yiO PHYSIOLOGY IN RELATION TO 



such infinitesimal particles as this hypothesis of Pangenesis postu- 

 lates that processes, to the naked eye the very reverse of Genesis, 

 have been found to depend ; and the Blue Book on the Cattle- 

 Plague (' Third Report of the Commissioners/ &c., p. 151) will show 

 you that here, too, we are dependent on the employment of the 

 very highest powers of the microscope ; and it is scarcely necessary 

 to add that its employer was in this case Professor Beale. 



If I have been short in speaking of the advantages which the 

 histology of modern days has conferred upon its therapeutics, 

 I might be shorter still in dealing with my third head — the 

 dependence, namely, of the healing art upon the facts of Anthro- 

 potomy — that is to say, upon the naked-eye knowledge of the 

 structure with which it has to concern itself. Some little, how- 

 ever, I must say with your permission. Some persons are inclined 

 to think that there is some sort of antagonism between the interests 

 of microscopic and those of naked-eye anatomy; and hints more or 

 less obscurely expressed may be found to this effect here and there 

 in writings even of the present day. It is in much the same spirit 

 that persons are found to say that the sending of missionaries to 

 the heathen abroad entails so much curtailment of similar work 

 at home, and others will say that the starting of any fresh 

 charitable institution necessitates the subduction of so much from 

 the funds available for those already on foot ; and that others 

 again will say that the encouragement of natural science is 

 * inimical ' to the progress and cultivation of literary and classical 

 studies. Now, all these views depend upon the radically false 

 assumption that intellectual and moral activities are limitable and 

 measurable by certain quantitative conditions, just as a man's 

 expenditure is or ought to be limited and measurable by his balance 

 in the bank. This analogy is a wholly fallacious one, but it has 

 nipped many an excellent project in the bud. A truer analogy is 

 furnished us by the history of those infinitesimal scraps of germinal 

 matter of which I was just now speaking, which are hard to 

 destroy even with floods of carbolic acid and copperas, and which 

 possess a faculty of self-multiplication wholly unparalleled within 

 my experience in the history of the metallic objects of which we 

 were just now speaking. Activity and earnestness, in fact, which 

 are some of the best things, resemble some of the worst in being 

 eminently contagious. The example of a strenuous labourer in 



