PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 405 
not, for instance, give you a running survey of ‘the progress of 
zoology during the Victorian era,” as was projected by the late 
Professor Parker. My position as president of a biological section 
is somewhat peculiar, for while I may perhaps claim to be a 
biologist in the more generous meaning of the term, my knowledge 
of the details of animal and vegetable morphology is unfortunately 
of a scanty description, so that at the present time I regret, as I 
often have regretted, the divorce which happened many years 
ago between those who studied structure and those who studied 
function. 
The consideration of my disabilities has; however, furnished me 
with an inspiration regarding the subject for an address, and I 
don’t think under the conditions I could do better than endeavour 
very briefly to place before you (1) the circumstances which led 
to this divorce of the studies of morphology and physiology, (2) 
the kind of work which morphologists and physiologists have been 
doing since the separation, together with the indications of a 
rapprochement of these two subjects at the present time. 
At the outset I may say that my remarks apply almost entirely 
to animal biology. Students of vegetable life have been more 
fortunate than we, in that this separation of the study of structure 
and function has occurred to a much smaller extent. 
Until fifty or sixty years ago the study of structure and 
function went hand in hand. The old anatomists as Hunter, V. 
Humboldt, Bichat, Johannes Miller, were also physiologists. Not 
only were these two subjects inseparably associated in the interest 
of the investigators, but the teaching of both divisions of biology 
was until an even later date usually entrusted to the same man. 
How, then, came they to be so widely divorced that many a 
morphologist regards an elementary acquaintance with the prin- 
ciples of physiology as hardly within his domain, and vice versa, 
many physiologists, distinguished in some particular direction, 
have been wont to consider that the business of the morphologist 
has no interest for them ? 
Ihave no hesitation in saying that differentiation has been 
carried to a pernicious extent in our science. Biology should still 
represent the study of living things. The morphologist has some- 
times almost appeared to lcse sight of this, by working continu- 
ously at structure as evidenced by spirit-hardened specimens 
together with microscopical sections of material, which has been 
stewed in paraftin and stained by various methods born of the 
ingenuity of that product of extreme differentiation, the micro- 
tomist. Physiologists have also often, I fear, been equally blinded 
to the fuller aims of their science in their endeavours to push 
present knowledge of mechanism, whether physical or chemical, 
as a complete explanation of some physiological process, forgetful, 
for the time-being, that there were two or three layers of living 
