AIM AND PROGRESS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 395 



become so inextricably entangled that they also were 

 mostly thrown overboard. How a science should be built 

 up anew had already been seen in the case of the other 

 sciences ; but the new task assumed colossal proportions ; 

 few steps had been taken towards accomplishing it, 

 and these first efforts were in some measure but crude 

 and clumsy. We need feel no astonishment that many 

 sincere and earnest men should at that time have 

 abandoned medicine as unsatisfactory, or on principle 

 given themselves over to an exaggerated empiricism. 



But well directed efforts produced the right result 

 more quickly even than many had hoped for. The 

 application of the mechanical ideas to the doctrine of 

 circulation and respiration, the better interpretation of 

 thermal phenomena, the more refined physiological study 

 of the nerves, soon led to practical results of the greatest 

 importance ; microscopic examination of parasitic struc- 

 tures, the stupendous development of pathological anatomy, 

 irresistibly led from nebulous theories to reality. We 

 found that we now possessed a much clearer means of 

 distinguishing, and a clearer insight into the mechanism 

 of the process of disease than the beats of the pulse, the 

 urinary deposit, or the fever type of older medical science 

 had ever given us. If I might name one department 

 of medicine in which the influence of the scientific 

 method has been, perhaps, most brilliantly displayed, it 

 would be in ophthalmic medicine. The peculiar con- 

 stitution of the eye enables us to apply physical modes of 

 investigation as well in functional as in anatomical 

 derangements of the living organ. Simple physical ex- 

 pedients, spectacles, sometimes spherical, sometimes cylin- 

 drical or prismatic, suffice, in many cases, to cure dis- 

 orders which in earlier times left the organ in a condition 

 of chronic incapacity; a great number of changes on 

 the other hand, which formerly did not attract notice 

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