OSLER 



4420 



OSMOSIS 



be chloroformed at sixty." On leaving Johns 

 Hopkins University in 1905, Osier delivered a 

 farewell address, in the course of which he re- 

 ferred to the "comparative uselessness of men 

 over forty years of age." "Take the sum of 

 human achievement," he said, "in action, in 

 science, in art, in literature, subtract the work 

 of the men above forty, ... we should 

 practically be where we are to-day." To this 

 he added: 



When a man nor wax nor honey can bring 

 home, he should in the interests of an institution, 

 be dissolved from the hive to give more laborers 

 room. 



These remarks were freely misquoted, and 

 gave the public a wrong idea of Osier's capacity 

 and ability. His work has touched nearly every 

 field of medicine. He has been a student and 

 has made experiments, and has given his fel- 

 low-practitioners the benefit of his studies. 

 Cerebral palsies, chorea, cancer of the stomach, 

 diseases of the spleen and liver are a few of the 

 subjects in which he is an authority. For many 

 years he was a teacher, and he surrounded him- 

 self with students who formed a school of 

 medicine which has left a permanent influence 

 on that science. In addition to many medical 

 books and monographs, Osier has written 

 widely in the less technical fields of medical his- 

 tory, biography and essays. Among his books 

 are The Principles and Practice of Medicine; 

 The Teacher and Student ; Science and Immor- 

 tality; A Way oj Life; Counsels and Ideals; 

 and Oliver Wendell Holmes, an Address. 



Sir William was born' at Bondhead, Ont., 

 studied at the Toronto School of Medicine and 

 McGill University, and in London, Berlin and 

 Vienna. From 1874, when he returned to 

 America, he was professor of physiology and 

 pathology at McGill University, until 1884, 

 when he became clinical professor of medicine 

 at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1888 he 

 went, as professor of the principles and practice 

 of medicine and chief physician of the hospital, 

 to Johns Hopkins University, where he re- 

 mained until his appointment, in 1905, as regius 

 professor of medicine at Oxford, England. 



Sir Edmund Boyd Osier (1845- ), a Cana- 

 dian financier and statesman, one of the lead- 

 ing bankers of the Dominion and since 1896 a 

 prominent Conservative member of the House 

 of Commons. Sir Edmund was born in Simcoe 

 County, Ontario. His business career was be- 

 gun in the employ of the Bank of Upper 

 Canada, at Toronto. Later he organized the 

 firm of Osier & Hammond, brokers and finan- 



ciers, and became its president. He also took 

 a leading part in railway development in On- 

 tario, and became a director in the Canadian 

 Pacific and several small railways. He is 

 president of the Dominion Bank and an officer 

 in many other banks and industrial corpora- 

 tions. He was an unsuccessful candidate for 

 mayor of Toronto in 1892, but was elected to 

 the House of Commons for West Toronto in 

 1896. In 1911 Sir Edmund was one of the most 

 active and most prominent opponents of the 

 reciprocity treaty with the United States. He 

 was knighted in 1912. For many years he was 

 a trustee of the University of Toronto; he re- 

 signed, however, in 1914, as a protest against 

 the continued employment of Germans as 

 members of the teaching staff. 



OS'MIUM, from a Greek word meaning 

 odor, occurs in platinum ores alloyed with the 

 metal iridiiim, as osmiridium. Pure osmium, 

 discovered in 1803, is in the form either of a 

 fine black powder or of a hard, blue-gray mass. 

 It is the heaviest substance known and the 

 hardest to melt, because it turns to vapor be- 

 fore a very high temperature is reached. When 

 heated above 200 degrees, a very irritating, 

 suffocating vapor is given off, and this accounts 

 for its name. The vapor may cause total or 

 partial blindness, by spreading a film of metal- 

 lic osmium over the eye- 

 fa a 1 1. Compounds of os- 

 mium stain the skin black. 

 The metal is used to tip 

 gold pen-points. Four ox- 

 ides are known, the perox- 

 ide or osmic acid being the 

 most important. 



OSMO'SIS, from a 

 Greek word meaning to 

 push, is the transfusion or" 

 mixture of two liquids sep- 

 arated by a membrane 

 such as parchment or blad- 

 der skin. It may easily 

 be demonstrated by tying 

 a bit of parchment securely T n t h e physlcal 



over one end of a glass experiment i 1 1 u s - 

 , , , . . , ,. trated above r rep- 

 tube containing a solution resents the glass 

 nf <5iicrnr nnH invprtinr thp tube containing su- 



01 sugar, ana inverting tne gar In solution> re _ 



tube in a vessel of water, ferred to in the text. 



Osmotic pressure 



so the water and the sugar has raised the water 



cr1iitirm nro nt th fanmp in tne tube half the 



solution are at the same dlstance to the top . 

 height. The water will 

 pass through the membrane more rapidly than 

 the sugar solution will pass out into the water, 

 and this mixing will continue until there is 



OSMOSIS 



