LECTURE I. 



VESALIUS: HIS FORERUNNERS AND FOLLOWERS. 



I MAKE no apology for having chosen as the subject of the 

 course of Lectures which you have honoured me by inviting me 

 to deliver, ' The History of Physiology.' We are, all of us, even 

 in this farthest West, even in this closing year of the nineteenth 

 century, Children of our Fathers. What we are is in part only 

 of our own making, the greater part of ourselves has come down 

 to us from the past. What we know and what we think is not 

 a new fountain gushing fresh from the barren rock of the 

 unknown at the stroke of the rod of our own intellect, it is a 

 stream which flows by us and through us, fed by the far-off 

 rivulets of long ago. As what we think and say to-day will 

 mingle with and shape the thoughts of men in the years to 

 come, so in the opinions and views which we are proud to hold 

 to-day, we may, by looking back, trace the influence of the 

 thoughts of those who have gone before. Tracking out how 

 new thoughts are linked to old ones, seeing how an error 

 cast into the stream of knowledge leaves a streak lasting 

 through many changes of the ways of man, noting the struggles 

 through which a truth now rising to the surface, now seemingly 

 lost in the depths, eventually swims triumphant on the flood 

 we may perhaps the better learn to appraise our present 

 knowledge, and the more rightly judge which of the thoughts 

 of to-day is on the direct line of progress, carrying the truth of 

 yesterday on to that of to-morrow, and which is a mere fragment 

 of the hour, floating conspicuous on the surface now but 

 destined soon to sink, and later to be wholly forgot. 

 f. l. 1 



