president's address. 15 



The body of the address is occupied in discussing the directions 

 ■of progress of both morphology and physiology, and emphasis is 

 laid on the fact that, in the case of both disciplines, the essential 

 problems have been followed up to the threshold of the living cell. 

 Thus Dr. Martin proceeds — ■" For the past fifty years the physi- 

 ologists have been principally concerned with the analysis of the 

 function of organs as such, and have more or less left aside the 

 physiology of cells. In my opinion they have been quite wise in 

 so doing. In this way all those physiological phenomena which 

 can be measured according to physical standards and interpreted 

 in terms of physics and chemistry and physics have, to a large 

 extent, been separated off from those that cannot. Processes in 

 which cells participate collectively as membranes or organs have 

 been more or less sharply defined from those in which they 

 operate by means of their individuality, and in which cases the 

 phenomena are intracellular. Surely it was wise to ascertain to 

 what extent a physiological result was due to the ph3^sical or 

 chemical properties of the matter concerned, in order to know at 

 what point the intervention of cellular activities is necessary " 

 Throughout the whole discussion of the ^'arious phases of the 

 physiological problem dealt with, Professor Martin appears to 

 agree with Dr. Haldane that in every case of function-analj'sis 

 the most characteristic and essential quality of the process has 

 been "tracked" into the cell. But if T rightly interpret Dr. 

 Martin's attitude, it differs from Dr. Haldane's in that the former 

 finds no necessity' for the abandonment, Ijut only for the further 

 prosecution of the methods of the last fifty years. As a phj'si- 

 ologist, he has evidently " no desire to cry a halt at this point," 

 even if " the knoivn laws of chemistry and physics seem so hope- 

 lessly incapable of furnishing any interpretation " of the problems 

 at issue. It is interesting to compai-e the attitude taken up by 

 Haldane and Martin respectively in reference to such an 

 apparently established physiological fact as that the tension of 

 oxygen in arterial blood is frequently higher than it is in the air 

 of the lung alveoli. This is interpreted by Haldane as signifying 

 that here we have evidence of a defiance of physico-chemical law, 



