2 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
literary, mathematical, physical, and chemical papers of the 
Royal Society, for example, the records of the work carried 
on by the members of this Society, during the last thirty-six 
years, in the domain of natural and biological science are 
second to none. 
When it is borne in mind that the membership of the 
Royal Physical Society was originally largely confined to 
physicians, and that the subjects first discussed at its meet- 
ings were those intimately associated with the problems 
that were daily presenting themselves to those who were 
engaged in teaching and practising medicine, it would appear 
that the Royal Physical Society has departed somewhat 
from the kind of work that its founders intended should be 
carried on; but when we consider that the students and 
eraduates in the Edinburgh Medical Schools have, according 
to their best traditions, engaged upon medicine as a life-work 
that could be built up only on a sound basis of natural and 
biological science, it is the more readily understood how 
anything and everything that had even a remote bearing on 
the everyday studies of these men should come to have an 
interest apart from its bearing on medicine, an interest that 
could be shared even by those who were not professed 
physicians, and how ultimately every man, whose love for 
science was such as to make him a worker in any of its 
fields, was welcomed with open arms by the Royal Physical 
Society. 
It thus, naturally enough, happened that as societies arose 
in which purely medical questions were discussed, the agenda 
lists of our Society came to include more and more purely 
scientific papers, and it came about that what we may call 
pure science gradually assumed to itself the greater share of 
the attention of our members. 
The Royal Physical Society was founded by the professors 
and students of medicine in the University, and for the first 
fifty years of its existence we are told that the work engaged 
on and the papers discussed were almost entirely of a medical 
nature. That these discussions would be valuable we have 
sufficient guarantee in the fact that Black, Cullen, Munro, 
Hope, Gregory, and many others, whose names are now 
