434 PHYSIOLOGY 



way a basis will be obtained upon which philosophy may reason, 

 more surely and more successfully than is possible now, concerning 

 the psychical life and its relations to the mechanical phenomena of 

 the universe. 



If I may summarize briefly my point of view regarding the 

 present problems of physiology, what I have wished to emphasize 

 is this. The experimental method, physical, chemical, biological, or 

 anatomical is the life and hope of the subject. Its future depends 

 solely upon the steadfast recognition of the necessity and possibil- 

 ities of this means of research. Every investigator who is. anxious 

 to add to the stock of physiological knowledge should experiment 

 ceaselessly by those methods which he is most capable of using, 

 while those who are looking forward to the highest work in physi- 

 ology should fit themselves by a thorough training in physics or 

 chemistry, since the most difficult and the most fundamental pro- 

 blems in the subject require the use of the methods and modes 

 of thought of these sciences. There must be an outlying division of 

 workers who will keep the subject in touch with practical medicine, 

 and other divisions through which communications will be estab- 

 lished with psychology and the morphological sciences; but the 

 flower of the army, the imperial guard, will consist of those who 

 have been disciplined in the methods of physics and chemistry, and 

 who are able to apply this training to the study of the properties 

 of living matter. 



SHORT PAPER 



PROFESSOR E. P. LYON, of St. Louis University, read a contribution before 

 this Section " On the Theory of Rheotropism in Free Swimming Animals," in 

 which he discussed the orientation of organisms in streams of water, a phe- 

 nomenon frequently observed, but having received thus far little attention. 



