594 



NATURE 



[October 21, 1897 



Welcker, sometime professor of anatomy in the University 

 of Halle, and a distinguished anthropologist ; Dr. R. Branchat, 

 professor of hygiene in the Medical Faculty of Granada ; Dr. 

 Leopold Auerbach, assistant professor of physiology in the 

 University of Breslau ; Mr. Percy Lund Simmonds, the author 

 of numerous works on various branches of technology. 



The International Leprosy Conference was opened at 

 the Imperial Board of Health, Berlin, on October II. Prof. 

 \'irchow was elected President of the Conference", and on his 

 proposal Prof. Lassar (Berlin) and Dr. A. Hansen (Bergen) 

 were elected Vice-Presidents, and Dr. Ehlers (Copenhagen) 

 Secretary-in-Chief. The Conference has appointed a commis- 

 sion composed of twenty members, with power to add to its 

 jiumber, to confer and prepare the way for an International 

 Leprosy Society. 



Physiological chemistry has just lost one of its most 

 diligent and capable workers in the person of Dr. Edmund 

 Drechsel, professor of physiological and pathological chemistry 

 and of pharmacology in the University of Berne. At the time 

 of his sudden death, Dr. Drechsel was at Naples working 

 in the Zoologrcal Station there at some of those problems 

 in the chemistry of the invertebrates which have recently 

 iibsorbed much of his attention. On September 22 he died 

 suddenly of disease of the heart, at the age of fifty-four. The 

 British Medical Journal gives the following particulars of the 

 career of this distinguished exponent of the chemistry of 

 physiology: — Born in Leipzig in 1843, ^e studied chemistry at 

 the University there with such success, from 1863 onwards, that 

 in 1865 he became assistant to Kolbe, who was then professor of 

 chemistry. He took his Doctor's degree in Philosophy in 1865. 

 In 1872 Ludwig appointed him his assistant in the Chemical 

 Department of the Physiological Institute, where he carried on 

 'many researches, and aided Ludwig and his numerous pupils 

 when they required assistance in matters chemical. In 1878 he 

 was elected Extraordinary Professor in the Medical Faculty, and 

 •remained at Leipzig under LuJvvig until he was called to Berne 

 to fill the chair of Physiological Chemistry there. In 1883 the 

 University of Leipzig conferred upon him the degree of M.D. 

 Much to his regret, Drechsel did not follow a medical career. 

 He entered upon the study of physiology purely from the 

 -chemical side, so that his work^always of the highest class and 

 carefully done — dealt rather with problems of a distinctly 

 chemical nature. He was a laborious and painstaking worker, 

 and whatever he did was done thoroughly. Drechsel made 

 many contributions to physiological chemistry, and he was a 

 iperfect encyclopaedia of knowledge regarding chemical problems 



It is so commonly assumed that poetry and science are 

 antagonistic, that an address delivered by the Poet Laureate, 

 Mr. Alfred Austin, at the opening of a new school of science 

 and art last week, deserves a wide publicity. Macaulay, with 

 his well-known love of antithesis, once endeavoured to show 

 that as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines ; 

 and taking science as one of the most important factors in the 

 civilising process, the inference is that a poet with a knowledge 

 of scientific facts labours under a disadvantage. Now, how- 

 ever, we are able to give a Poet Laureate's opinion that science 

 and art are complementary to one another and not rivals. 

 Science, said Mr. Austin, is exact knowledge — that and nothing 

 more. But exact knowledge is the foundation of all the arts, 

 :and no man ever achieved real greatness in any of them who 

 did not have the firmest grasp of the permanent facts which 

 anderlie them. Music, the most intangible and fantastic of 

 'the arts, cannot move one step, nor excite a single emotion with- 

 out submitting to the severe discipline of numbers. Finally, 

 the matter of a poet's verse is not of much account unless it be 

 animated by the scientific spirit of close and wide observation 

 NO. 1460, VOL. 56] 



and of loving accuracy. There is thus no means of getting 

 away from exact knowledge or science if one aspires to be an 

 artist. . It must be obvious to any one who has read the 

 " Divina Commedia " that the greatest poet of the middle ages, 

 than whom there was none greater in any age, was thoroughly 

 familiar with all the science or exact knowledge of his time ; 

 and Leonardo da Vinci, who might have equals, but had no 

 superior in the realm of painting, was not more fascinated by 

 artistic conceptions than by what are called scientific problems ; 

 and at these he laboured indefatigably. Alike, therefore, by 

 necessity and choice, art exhibits a sympathetic kinship with 

 science. The scientific spirit, far from being hostile to the 

 artistic spirit, is ancillary to it, for, as Dryden said, "Genius is 

 perfected by science." The noblest manifestations of both have 

 always occurred in one and the same epoch. Athens produced 

 Euclid as well as Praxiteles ; the vigorous old age of Michael 

 Angelo overlapped the precocious youth of Galileo ; and Bacon 

 was the contemporary of Shakespeare. And though the century 

 now drawing to a close has been pre-eminently a scientific 

 century, the locomotive and the telephone will not be more 

 enduring than the verse of Byron and Tennyson, or than the 

 pictures of Turner and Watts. The reasoning intellect is the 

 foundation alike of science and of art ; but, concluded Mr. 

 Austin, while reason alone suffices to science, art is reason 

 transfigured by tmotion. 



The Harveian Oration was delivered before the Royal 

 College of Physicians on Monday by Sir William Roberts, 

 F.R.S., who considered Harvey's life and work, not so much 

 as they concern special studies, but as symbolising the com- 

 mencement of a new era in human progress— the era of exact 

 science— which, in the present age, is slowly but surely trans- 

 figuring the aspects and prospects of civilised society. He re- 

 marked that, speaking broadly, the older civilisations rested 

 essentially upon art and literature (including philosophy), while 

 modern civilisation rests, in addition, upon science and all that 

 science brings in its train. A sharp distinction must be drawn 

 between the so called science of antiquity and the science of 

 to-day. The ancients had a large acquaintance with the pheno- 

 mena of nature, and were the masters of many inventions. They 

 knew how to extract the common metals from their ores ; they 

 made glass ; they were skilled agriculturists ; they could bake, 

 brew, and make wine, manufacture butter and cheese, spin, 

 weave, and dye cloth ; they had marked the motions of 

 the heavenly bodies, and kept accurate record of time 

 and seasons ; they used the wheel, pulley, and lever ; and knew 

 a good deal of the natural history of plants and animals, and of 

 anatomy and practical medicine. This store of information had 

 been slowly acquired in the course of ages — mostly through hap- 

 hazard discovery and chance observation — and formed a body of 

 knowledge of inestimable value for the necessities, conveniences, 

 and embellishments of life. But it was not science in the 

 modern sense of the word. None of this knowledge was 

 systematised and interpreted by coordinating principles ; nor 

 illuminated by generalisations which might serve as incentives 

 and guides to further acquisitions. Such knowledge had no 

 innate spring of growth ; it could only increase, if at all, by 

 casual additions — as a loose heap of stones might increase — and 

 much of it was liable at any time to be swept away into oblivion 

 by the flood of barbaric conquest. It is quite obvious, from 

 the subsequent course cf events, that there came into the 

 world of natural knowledge about three centuries ago, in the 

 time of Galileo and Harvey, a something — a movement, an 

 impulse, a spirit — which was distinctly new — which Bacon, with 

 prophetic insight, termed a " new birth of time." This re- 

 markable movement did not originate with any startling reve- 

 lation ; it consisted rather in an altered mental attitude, and a 

 method. There arose a distrust in the dicta of authority, and 



