330 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



men should be excluded from the intellectual part of their 

 own sciences. 1 



1 " The ossification of the intellect, like that of the larynx, occurs 

 earlier in some persons than in others. . . . But the mind is liable to a 

 much more disastrous change ; like the man of whom it was said that he 

 had been dead for some years but people did not like to tell him so, it 

 may while still seemingly alive undergo a process analogous to fossiliza- 

 tion. Examples are seen in all departments of human activity, but in 

 none are they so conspicuous as in science, which is nothing if not 

 progressive. ... At the recent meeting of the French medical congress 

 ... in Paris, Professor Cornil delivered an address on the part played 

 by morbid anatomy in contemporary medicine, in which he told of the 

 opposition which the newer science met with from the powers and 

 principalities of medicine in his own early days. The story is so 

 interesting that we venture to repeat it almost in the words of the 

 distinguished narrator. Professor Cornil as a student first worked in 

 the hospitals from 1857 to 1860. At that time Virchow's great work on 

 cellular pathology had lately been published, and Trousseau's career as 

 a clinical student had begun. The faculty of Paris, justly proud of the 

 fame of Corvisart, Laennec, Bouillaud, Grisolle, and so many others, 

 was strongly inclined stare super antiquas vias. Official medicine had 

 indeed, like Bottom, * an exposition of sleep ' come upon it, and it was 

 content to dream of the glory of the great men who had shed lustre on 

 it. Instead of going forward, many of the teachers of that day recom- 

 mended to their pupils old writers like Baglivi, Borsieri, Lorry, Franck, 

 and Boerhaave with the commentary of Van Swieten. At the Academy 

 of Medicine, Velpeau vehemently denounced the histological examina- 

 tions of tumours made by Lebert, Follin, Verneuil. When Professor 

 Cornil presented his thesis for the doctors degree in 1864, which dealt 

 with the histology of nephritis, one of his examiners said to him, ' Your 

 work is extremely meritorious, but what the devil is the good of it all ? 

 Have you found under your microscope a way to cure albuminuria ? ' 

 Another said : ' You speak in your paper of the multiplication and 

 proliferation of cells ; have you ever seen such a thing 1 I have often 

 tried, but have never succeeded.' The examiner was good enough to 

 describe his method of search, which struck the young candidate as so 

 futile that he thought it prudent to say nothing ; his silence gave his 

 judge an easy triumph. Such being the attitude of the Faculty, it can 

 readily be understood that it was by no means disposed to sanction the 

 establishment of a chair of histology. Duruy, one of the most enlight- 

 ened Ministers of Public Instruction France has ever possessed, had for 

 years striven to overcome the resistance of the Faculty, and a small 

 coup d'etat was required to make it yield. It is an interesting piece of 

 medical history. We, however, have no reason to congratulate ourselves 

 that we are not even as those foreigners. Fossilization is as common 

 here as elsewhere. Have we not known one of the greatest teachers of 

 physiology who to the last denied the migration of blood corpuscles ? 

 Have we not known a physician of the highest eminence who said, in 

 reference to the same thing, that he would as soon believe that a brick 

 could pass through the wall of a house as that a corpuscle could escape 

 from a blood-vessel ? Did not a leading surgeon, only twenty -five years 

 ago, warn his pupils against speaking of the ' lumen' of an artery to the 

 examiners at the College of Surgeons, because 'they would pluck you 

 for it, you know ? ' Lister's teaching encountered no more bigoted 



