| Sept. 22, 1870] 
NATURE 
of literary culture, my view of the relations of these two gym- 
nastics of the mind being the very simple, obvious, and natural one 
that they should be harmoniously combined— 
Alterius sic 
Altera sic poscit opem vis, et coujuvat amice. 
I know it may be said that there are difficulties in the way, and 
especially practical difficulties, but 1 have always observed that 
people why are good at finding out difficulties, and especially 
practical difficulties, are like people who are good at finding out 
excuses, —good at finding out very little else. The various ways of 
getting over these difficulties are obvious enough, and have been 
hinted at, or fully expressed by several writers of greater or less 
authority on many occasions. It is, however, of some consequence 
that I should here say what I believe has not been said before, 
namely, that a purely and exclusively literary education imperfect 
and one sided, as it is, is still a better thing than a system of scien- 
tific instruction (to abuse the use of the word fora moment) in 
which there should be no courses of practical familiarising with 
natural objects, verification, and experimentation. A purely 
literary training, say, in dialectics, or what we are pleased to call 
logic. to take a flagrant and glaring instance first, does confer 
certain lower advantages upon the person who goes through it 
without any discipline in the practical investigation of actual pro- 
blems. By going through such a training attentively, a man with a 
good memory anda little freedom from over-scrupulousness, can 
convert his mind into an arsenal of quips, quirks, retorts, and 
epigrams, out of which he can, at his own pleasure, discharge a 
mitraille of chopped straw and chaif-like arguments, against 
which no man of ordinary fairness of mind can, = for the 
moment, make head. It is true that such sophists gain 
this dexterity at the cost of losing, in every case, the power 
_of fairly and fully appreciating or investigating truth ; of 
losing in many cases the faculty of sustaining and maintaining 
serious attention to any subject ; and of losing in some cases 
even the power of writing. A well-known character in an age 
happily, though only recently, gone by, who may be taken asa 
Ceesar worthy of such Antonies, used to speak of a pen as his 
torpedo. Sull they have their reward, they succeed now and 
then iu conyincing juries, and they are formidable at dinner 
tables. It would not be fair, however, not to say that a purely 
1 terary training can do much better things than this. By a purely 
Classical Education a man, from being forced into seeing 
and feelmg that other men could look upon the world, moral, 
social and physical, with other (even if not with larger) eyes 
than ours, aitains a certain flexibility of mind which enables him 
t» enter into the thoughts of other and living men, and this is a 
very desirable attainment. And, finally, though I should be 
sorry to hold witha French writer that the style makes the man, 
the benefit of being early familiarised with writings which the 
peculiar social condition of the classical times, so well pointed out 
by De Tocqueville (De fa Démocratie en Amérique), conspired 
and contributed not a little to make models of style, is not to be 
despised. Such a familiarity may not confer the power of imita- 
ting or rivalling such compositions, but it may confer the power 
of appreciating their excellences, the one power appearing to us 
to be analogous to the power of the experimenter, and the other 
to that of the pure observer in Natural Science ; and we should 
undervalue neither. 
Masters of Science, it must be confessed, are not always 
masters of style ; let not the single instance of last night tempt 
you; to generalise, it was but a single instance, the writings of 
the man whom we in this Section are most of us likely to look 
upon as our master in Science have been spoken of by our 
President in his recently published volume as ‘‘ intellectual 
pemmican ;” and if scientific reading and teaching is to be 
divorced from scientific observation of natural objects and 
processes, it is better that a man, young or old, should have in 
his memory something which is perfect of its kind, entire and 
unmutilated, such as the opening of sentences of the Brutus of 
Cicero, which Tacitus, I think, must have had in his memory when 
he wrote his obituary of Agricola, or as the opening sentences 
yof the Republic of Plato, or the conclusion of the Ajax or 
Sophocles, than that he should have his memory laden with 
a consignment of scientific phrases which ex Aypothesi have for 
him no virtual reality. I have already said that I am strongly 
of opinion that literary should always be combined with scientific 
instruction in a perfect educational course ; these somewhat 
lengthy remarks refer therefore only to systems in which it is 
proposed that we should have not only a bifurcation but a radical 
425 
separation of studies and students, and the moral of this may be 
summed up by saying that a purely scientific education must be a 
thoroughly practical one, familiarising the student with actual 
things as well as with words and symbols. It was upon the 
solid ground that Anteus learnt the art of wrestling, it was only 
when he allowed himself to be lifted from it that he was 
strangled by Hercules. 
Coming now to the second part of my address, 1 beg to say that 
the word Biology is at present used in two senses, one wider, the 
other more restricted. In this latter sense the word becomes 
equivalent to the older, and till recently more currently used 
word ‘* Physiology ;” it is in the wider sense that the word is 
used when we speak of this as being the section of Biology ; and 
this wider sense is a very wide one, for it comprehends animal 
anl vegetable Physiology and Anatomy, firstly ; Eumology and 
Anthropology, secondly ; and thirdly, Scientific Zoology and 
Classificatory Botany, inclusively of the Distribution of Species. 
It may have been possible in former times for a single individual 
of great powers of assimilation to keep himself abreast of, and on 
a level with, the advance of knowledge along all these various 
lines of investigation ; but in those times knowledge was not, and 
could not, owing to difficulties of intercommunication, the dearness 
of books, the costliness or the non-existence of instruments, have 
been increased at the rate at which it is now being, year by year, 
increased ; and the entire mass of actually existiag and acquired 
knowledge was of course much smaller, though man’s power of 
mastering it was no smaller than at present. It would now be an 
indication of very great ignorance in anybody which should pre- 
tend that his own stock of information could furnish him with 
something in each one of the several departments of knowledge 
I have just mentioned, which should be worthy of being laid before 
such an assembly as this. As will have been expected, I shall 
not presume to do more than glance at the vegetable kingdom, 
large as is the space in the landscape of life which it makes, 
What I do propose to do is merely to draw your attention to a 
very few of the topics of leading interest, which are at the pre- 
sent moment being, or rather will shortly begin to be, discussed 
by experts in the Department of Physiology and Anatomy ; in 
the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology; and thirdly, 
in the Department of Scientific Zoology. 
Under the head and in the Department of Physiology Proper 
and Anatomy, our list of papers and, I am happy to add, the 
circle of faces around us suggests to us the following subjects as 
being the topics of main interest for the present year : the questions 
of Spontaneous Generation ; that of the influence of organised 
particles in the production of disease ; that of the influence of 
particular nervous and chemical agencies upon functions ; that of 
the localisation of cerebral functions ; that of the production and 
indeed of the entire yo/e in the economy of creation of such 
substances as fat and albumen ; and, finally, that of the cost at 
which the work of the animal machine is carried on. 
The question of Spontaneous Generation touches upon certain 
susceptibilities which lie outside the realm of science. In this 
place, however, we have to do only with scientific arguments, 
and I trust that the Section will support the Committee in their - 
wish to exclude from our discussions all extraneous considera- 
tions. Truth is one ; allroads which really lead to it will assuredly 
converge sooner or later; our business is to see that the one we 
are ourselves concerned with is properly laid out and metalled. 
Upon this matter I am glad to be able to fortify myself by 
two authorities ; and first of these I will place an utterance of 
Archbishop Whately, which may be found in the second volume of 
his Life, pp. 66-68, zt. 57, an. 1844. ‘‘A person possessing 
real faith will be fully convinced that whatever suppressed physical 
fact appears to militate against his religion will be proved by 
physical investigation either to be unreal or else reconcilable 
with his religion. If I were to found a church, one of my articles 
would be that it is not allowable to bring forward Scripture 
or any religious considerations at all to prove or disprove any 
physical theory or any but religious and moral considerations,” 
My second quotation shall be taken from the great work of one 
of the fist, as I apprehend, of living theologians, John Macleod 
Campbell, ‘‘The Nature of the Atonement,” pp. xxxii.—xxxiii. 
Introd., and it runs thus :—There are ‘‘ other minds whose habits 
of pure scientific investigation are to them a temptation to 
approach the claim of the Kingdom of God on our faith by a 
wrong path, causing them to ask for a kind of evidence not 
proper to the subject, and so hindering their weighing fairly 
what belongs to it. No scientific study of the phenomena which 
imply a reign of law could ever haye issued in the discovery of 
