Sept. 27, 1883] 



NATURE 



5i7 



Bramwell, Sir F.- 



G — Mechanics 

 -Patent Legislation 



Total 



■_£S 



^1445 



SECTION D 

 DIOLOGY 



Opening Address bv Prof. E. Ray I.axkester, M.A., 

 F.R.S., F.L.S., President of the Section. 



It has become the custom for the presidents of the various 

 Sections of this Association to open the proceedings of the depart- 

 ments with the chairmanship of which they are charged by formal 

 addre-ses. In reflecting on the topics which it might be desir- 

 able for me to bring under your notice, as your president, on the 

 present occasion, it has occurred to me that I might u.-e this 

 opportunity must fitly by departing somewhat from the prevailing 

 custom of reviewing the progress of >cience in some special 

 direction during the past year, and that, instead of placing before 

 you a summary of the results recently obtained by the investiga- 

 tions of biologists in this or that line of inquiry, I might ask 

 your attention and that of the external public (who are wont to 

 give some kindly consideration to the opinions expressed on 

 these occasions) to a matter which is even more directly con- 

 nected with the avowed object of our Association, namely, "the 

 Advancement of Science." I propose to place before you a few 

 observations upon the provision which exists in this country for 

 the advancement of that branch of science to which Section 1 1 

 is dedicated — namely, Biology. 



I am aware that it is usual for those who speak of men of 

 science and their pursuits to ignore altogether such sordid tojjics 

 as the one which I have chosen to bring forward. A certain 

 pride on the one hand, and a willing acquiescence on the other 

 hand, usually prevents those who are profe-sionally concerned 

 with scientific pursuits from exposing to the public the pecuniary 

 destitution and the consequent crippling and languor of scientific 

 research in this country. Those Englishmen who take an interest 

 in the progress of science are apt to suppose that, in some way 

 which they have never clearly understood, the pursuit of scientific 

 truth is not only its own reward, but also a sufficient source of 

 food, drink, and clo hing. Whilst they are interested and 

 amused by the remarkable discoveries of scientific men, they are 

 astonished whenever a proposal is mentioned to assign salaries to 

 a few such persons .sufficient to enable them to live decently 

 while devoting their time and strength to investigation. The 

 public are becoming more and more anxious to have the opinion 

 or report of scientific men upon matters of commercial importance, 

 or in relation to the public health ; and yit in ninety nine ca es 

 out of a hundred they expect tohave that opinion for the asking, 

 although accustomed to pay other profes-ional men handsomely 

 for similar service. There i--, it appears, in the public mind a 

 vague belief that men who occupy their time with the endeavour 

 to add to knowledge in this or that branch of science are 

 mysteriously supported by the State Exchequer, and are thus 

 fair game for attneking with all sorts of demands for gratuitous 

 sen-ice ; or, on the other band, the notion at work appears 

 sometimes to be that the making of new knowledge — in fact, 

 scientific discovery — is an agreeable pastime, in which some 

 ingenious gentlemen, whose business in other directions ta!.es up 

 their best hours, find relaxation after dinner or on the spare 

 hours of Sunday. Such mistaken views ought to be dispelled 

 with all possible celerity and determination. It is in part owing 

 to the fact that the real state of the case is not w idely and per- 

 sistently made known to the public, that no attempt is made in 

 this country to raise scientific research, and especially biological 

 research, from the condition of destitution and neglect under 

 which it suffers — a condition which is far below that of these 

 same interests in France and Germany, and even in Holland, 

 Belgium, Italy, and Russia, and is discreditable to England in 

 proportion as she is richer than other States. 



It appears to me that, in placing this matter before you, I may 

 remove myself from any suggestion of self interest by at once 

 stating that the great defect to which I shall draw your attention 

 is not that the few existing public positions which are open in 

 this country to men who intend to devote their chief energies to 

 biological research are endowed with insufficient salaries ; but 

 that there is not anything like a sufficiently large number of those 

 posts, and that there is in that respect, from a national point of 

 view, a pecuniary starvation of biology, a withholding of money 

 which (to use another metaphor) is no less the sinews of the 

 war of science against ignorance than of other less glorious cam- 

 paigns. Surely men engaged in the scientific profession may 



advocate the claim of science to ma ntenance and needful 

 pecuniary provision ! It seems to me that we should, if neces- 

 sary, swallow, rather than be controlled by, that pride which 

 tempts us to paint the scientific career as one far above and 

 independent of pecuniary considerations ; whereas all the while 

 we know that knowledge is languishing, that able men are draw n 

 off from scientific research into other careers, that important 

 discoveries are approached and their final grasp relinquished, 

 that great men depart and leave no disciples or successors, simply 

 for want of that which is largely given in other countries, of that 

 which is most abundant in this country, and is so lavishly ex- 

 pended on armies and navies, on the development of commercial 

 resources, on a hundred injurious or meaningless charities — viz., 

 money. 



I have no doubt that I have the sympathy of all my hearers in 

 wishing for more extensive provision in this country for the 

 prosecution of scientific research, and especially of biological 

 research. I need hardly remind this audience of the almost 

 romantic history of some of the great discoveries which have 

 been made in reference to the nature and history of living things 

 during the | ast century. The microscope, which was a drawing- 

 room toy a hundred years ago, has, in tbe hands of devoted and 

 gifted -tudent- of nature, been the means of giving us knowledge 

 which, on the one hand, has saved thousands of surgical 1 aiients 

 from terrible pain and d ath, and, on the other hand, has laid 

 the foundation of that new philosophy with which the name of 

 Darwin will fir ever lie associated. When Ehrenherg and, 

 later, Dujardin de-cribed and figured the various forms of 

 Monas, Vibrio, Spirillum, and Bacterium which their microscopes 

 revealed to thtm, no one could predict that fifty years later these 

 organi ms would be recognised as the cau^e of that dangerous 

 suppuration of wounds which so often defeated the beneficent 

 efforts of the surgeon and made an operation in a hospital ward 

 as dangerous to the patient as residence in a plague-stricken city. 

 Vet this is the result » hkh the assiduous studies of the biologi-ts, 

 provided with laboratories and maintenance by Continental States, 

 have in due time brought to light. Theodore Schwann, profess, r 

 at I icge, first showed that these Bacteria are the cau'e of the 

 putrefaction of organic substances, and subsequently the French 

 chemist Pasteur, professor in the Kcole Normale of Paris, con- 

 firmed and extended Schwann's discovery, so as to establish the 

 belief that all putrefactive changes are due to such minute 

 organisms and that if these organisms can be kept at bay no 

 putrefaction cin occur in any given substance. 



It was reserved for our countryman, Joseph lister, to apply 

 this result to the treatment of wounds, and by his famous 

 antiseptic me'hod to destroy by means of special poisons the 

 putrefactive organisms which necessarily find their way into (he 

 neighbourhood of a wound, or of the surgeon's knife and 

 dressings, at d to ward off by similar means the access of such 

 organisms to the wounded surface. The amount of death, njt 

 to speak of the sufferii g short of death, which the knowledge 

 of Bacteria gained by the microscope has thus averted is incal- 

 culable. 



Yet further, the discoveries of Ehrenberg, Schwann, and 

 Pasteur are bearing fruit of a similar kind in other directions. 

 It seems in the highest degree probable that the terrible scourge 

 known as tubercular cons uujption or phthisis is due to a parasitic 

 Bac'erium (Bacillus), discovered two years since by Koch of 

 Berlin, as the immediate result of investigations which he was 

 commissioned to carry on at the public expense, in the specially 

 erected Laboratory of Public Health, by the German Imperial 

 Government. The diseases known as erysipelas and glanders 1 r 

 farcy have similarly, within the past few months in German 

 State-supported laboratories, been shown to le due to the 

 attacks of special kinds of Bacteria. At present this knowledge 

 has not led to a successful method of combating those diseases, 

 but we can hardly doubt that it will ultimately do so. We are 

 warranted in this belief by the fact that the disea e known as 

 "splenic fever "in cattle and "malignant pustule" or anthrax in 

 man has likewise been shown to be due to the action of a special 

 kind of Bac'erium, and that this knowledge has, in the hands c.f 

 MM. Toussaint and Tasteur, led to a treatment in relation to 

 this disease similar to that of vaccination in relation to small-pox. 

 By cultivation a modified growth of the anthrax parasite is 

 obtained, which is then used in order to inoculate cattle and 

 sheep with a mild form of the disease, such inoculation having 

 the result of rendering the cattle and 1 heep free from the attacl s 

 of the severe form of disease, just as vaccination or inoculaticn 

 with cow-pox protects man from the attack of the deadly small- 

 pox. One other case I may call to mind in which knowledge 



