[ ADAMI] PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 7 
After long months a second inoculation with one or other toxin stimu- 
lates an immediate, or most rapid and abundant production of the speci- 
fic antitoxin. 
The demonstration is complete and one can afford abundant in- 
stances of the same order, proving that functional variation of a per- 
manent type in the individual is produced by variations in cell environ- 
ment. But I never see the ordinary academic biologist seizing upon 
these data. 
Truth to say, just as our students appear to regard their successive 
courses of lectures as so many water-tight compartments: seem to hold 
it anathema to apply what they have acquired in their anatomical teach- 
ing to what they see in the out-patient department of the hospital, 
and seem almost insulted when they are asked to apply physiological 
or biological data to the elucidation of a pathological problem; so we 
students of a larger growth are insulted when workers in what we con- 
sider a totally different department of science undertake investigations 
which we regard as the peculiar prerogative of our own particular 
‘Fach’. It is the same water-tight compartment idea:—‘ Can any good 
come out of Nazareth?’ 
I would willingly have brought before you the work being accom- 
plished by the medical zoologists : by the workers in Tropical Medicine 
with their valuable studies upon the habits of mosquitos, tabanidae and 
other insects which act as the carriers of infection: by the medical 
chemists—the extraordinary synthetic work achieved by Ehrlich, for 
example, ending in the production of the arsenic compound ‘ 606,’ which 
destroys the organisms of sleeping sickness, syphilis and many spiril- 
loses; or the corresponding work of Wassermann which promises to give 
us a cure for at least some forms of cancerous growth. But this ad- 
dress has already attained and more than attained, its due length. I 
shall be satisfied if I have shown you not merely that medicine is striv- 
ing to be yearly more and more scientific, but that medical men working 
at medical problems along now physical, now chemical, now biological 
lines are gaining results of the first order of importance not for medicine 
alone, but for science in general. 
It is good to think that work of this order is now emanating out 
of Canada—that to mention but one example, one of our colleagues 
stands foremost as a pioneer in the development of methods of micro- 
chemistry and thereby has introduced new view-points in cytology and 
the study of living matter and its properties. May such work continue 
and increase. Gentlemen, I wish you a most successful and helpful 
meeting. 
