PHYSIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 73 



made, resulting especially from the introduction of 

 the microscope as an instrument of research. The 

 structural conditions on which the processes of life 

 depend had become accessible to investigation. 

 The application of experimental methods derived 

 from the exact sciences aroused hopes for the solution 

 of many physiological problems. Progress in the 

 science of chemistry afforded ground for such hopes, 

 and particularly the discovery that many of the com- 

 pounds which before had been regarded as special 

 products of vital processes could be produced in 

 the laboratory. In like manner the new school of 

 physiology profited by the advances which had been 

 made in physics, partly by borrowing from the 

 physical laboratory various improved methods of 

 observing the phenomena of living beings, but chiefly 

 in consequence of the direct bearing of the crowning 

 discovery of that epoch, that of the conservation of 

 energy, and the discussions which then took place as 

 to the relations between vital and physical forces. 



A section of Sir Edwin Ray Lankester's presi- 

 dential address in 1906 is headed with the word 

 ' Psychology/ and he observed : 



' 1 have given a special heading to this subject 

 because its emergence as a definite line of experi- 

 mental research seems to me one of the most impor- 

 tant features in the progress of science in the past 

 quarter of a century. . . . The physiological methods 

 of measurement (which are the physical ones) have 

 been more and more widely, and with guiding 

 intelligence and ingenuity, applied since those days 

 to the study of the activities of the complex organs 

 of the nervous system which are concerned with 



