4 ADAPTATION AND DISEASE 



fectious Diseases, of Medical Research are as unknown territory 

 to him as the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, the 

 Journal of Morphology, or the Proceedings of the Linnean Society 

 are to us. We would sooner think of writing a letter to the 

 Times than to that academic go-between of men of science, 

 Nature. 



And then, again, just as, in the old unhappy far-off days, 

 a Bart's man disbelieved that any good surgery could come 

 out of Thomas's or George's, and the Thomas's or George's 

 surgeon returned the compliment ; just as the British medical 

 man disbelieved such articles as appeared in the American 

 medical journals, or, to come nearer to our own times, just as 

 the Germans of late years, with rare and distinguished excep- 

 tions, regarded themselves as the sole recipients of pathological 

 truth, treating British, French, and American pathologists in 

 general as very Nazarenes, so, it has to be confessed, there is 

 a tendency for the academic biologist to be indifferent to, if 

 not actually to resent, and throw discredit upon the work of 

 those who, not belonging to his particular class, are therefore 

 to be regarded as of the nature of outsiders. This is not a 

 revelation of the spirit of pure science, but a comforting demon- 

 stration that men of science are, nevertheless, pure human beings. 

 Underlying this spirit is a natural and in many respects wise 

 caution in accepting the observations of workers with whose 

 quality and standing the individual is unfamiliar. But this 

 hesitancy may be carried too far. 



If I speak with a little feeling, it is because I still cannot 

 forget the reception accorded by zoological confreres to the 

 most original, and at the same time most sound physiologist 

 of his period, my old teacher and friend Walter Gaskell, when 

 he was led by his studies upon the functions of the nervous 

 system studies which have so profoundly influenced modern 

 medicine to trace the development of the same, and doing this, 

 after long years of close study of its comparative morphology, 

 to reach conclusions regarding the origin of the vertebrate 

 which were not in harmony with the doctrines of descent then 

 currently accepted. So far as I, an outsider, could determine, 

 each link in the chain of Gaskell's reasoning was supported by 

 appeal to observed facts, and by microscopical studies of singular 

 interest ; so far as I, a pathologist, could test his conclusions, 



