MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 709 



safely be tried ; if carbolic acid can be safely introduced into a 

 wounded pleural cavity, assuredly we need not hesitate about tbe 

 passing of it into a bladder. Thus many scientific researches, 

 undertaken in the first instance for the elucidation of speculative 

 truth, and for the rectification not of unsound organs and func- 

 tions but of unsound theories and explanations, and prosecuted 

 throughout by the aid of the most refined methods and instru- 

 ments, come ultimately to bear upon such matters as catheterisa- 

 tion and alkalescent urine. I would not, however, be thought 

 to undervalue the worth of researches carried on at whatever cost 

 with the sole object of procuring correct notions as to the way 

 in which processes, even wholly beyond our power of modification, 

 have been and are being carried on. It is a great and positive 

 gain when we get rid of one false hypothesis, one single false 

 formula which by frequent repetition has attained to the dignity 

 of a philosophic axiom, and acquired a sort of prescriptive right to 

 ' warp us from the living truth.' The Chemists, as I am informed, 

 are conspiring to efiect what the old Greeks would have called 

 a 'Catalysis' of the kingdom of 'Catalysis' itself, and its banish- 

 ment to the Limbo of Vanity, there to herd with Phlogiston and 

 many other and younger as well as older unsubstantial Idola 

 Theatri; and though these alterations of theory may not as yet 

 have affected the oxygen we breathe, nor even have enabled us as 

 yet to regulate with any greater precision the processes of fermenta- 

 tion with which we have for so many ages had an empirical 

 familiarity, they have given us at least a warning as to maintaining 

 always that proper diffidence as to the all-sufficient validity of 

 our theories, by whomsoever promulgated or endorsed, which is so 

 constantly of avail in actual practical work. The phaenomena, let 

 me add, to account for which the hypothesis of Pangenesis has 

 been recently (Darwin, ' Animals and Plants under Domestication,' 

 J 868, ii. p. 403) put forward provisionally, are, and will, we may 

 believe, always remain, beyond our control ; but there will be no 

 one, I suppose, who will not feel an interest in observing how the 

 revelations in the all but infinite divisibility of ' germinal matter/ 

 which we owe to Professor Beale, may come to bear upon the 

 explanation of the marvellous phaenomena of reproduction and 

 hereditary transmission. Nor can I leave this subject without re- 

 marking that it is in great probability upon the self-multiplication of 



