Oct()!!i:k 15. 1896] 



NA TURE 



5S1 



ever in \ >iing Kayrer's schedule, ami Ihat llie one short course of 

 chemistry, without any practical instruction, which he attended 

 was taken in his second year — in the middle, as it were, of his 

 curriculum, when he was already advanced in his clinical studies. 



Al the present time the sciences of physics and chemistry have 

 each of them developed into a body of logically coordinate 

 truths, furnishing an instrument of peculiar value for the train- 

 ing of the scientific mind. .Moreover the methods of teaching 

 have developed in no less a degree, so that in the laboratory the 

 student follows, at a long distance, it is true, but still follows the 

 steps of those who have made the science, andh.isat least the op- 

 portunity of catching something of the spirit of scientific inquiry. 

 In this educational value of these sciences, even more than in 

 the practical utility of a knowledge of the mere facts of the 

 sciences, great as that may be, lies the justification of the 

 authorities when these, desiring to improve llie profession by in- 

 troducing artificial selection into the struggle for existence, 

 insist that all to whom the lives and health of their fellow men 

 are to be entrusted, should have learnt at least something of the 

 sciences in ipiesiion. 



In the lime of Hu.\ley's studentship lioth these sciences were 

 in a very diflerent condition. The time, it is true, was one of 

 great awakening. In physics men's minds were busy opening 

 up the hidden powers of electricity : some ten years before Fara- 

 tlay had made an epoch by discovering induced currents ; he and 

 others were still rapidly e.-itending our knowledge, one prac- 

 lical outcome of which was the introduction of the telegraph in 

 1S37. But how great has been the onward sweep in electric 

 science since then ; how great the advance in all branches of 

 jihysics I To realise the great gap v\ hich separates the physics 

 of to-day from the physics of then, one has only to call to mind 

 that the world had yel to wait some years before Mayer, and 

 Joule, and Helmholtz, and Grove had said their say ; in the 

 books which taught young Huxley the laws of physics he found 

 not a word of that great law of the conservation of energy, which 

 like a lamp now guides the feet of every physical inquirer, what- 

 ever be the special path along which he treads. 



In chemistry much, too, was being done. That science was 

 in the first flush of success in its attack on the mysteries of 

 organic compounds. Liebig, Dumas, and others were rapidly 

 making discoveries of new organic liodies, and dealing with 

 types and substitution, were beginning to make their way into 

 the secrets of chemical constitution ; but then, as indeed for a 

 long time afterwards, progress was taking the form of the 

 accumidaiion of new facts interesting and eminently useful, but 

 still mere facts, rather than of the gaining of insight into those 

 laws of chemical change of which the facts are but the expres- 

 sion. -And the brilliant success of purely organic chemistry was 

 somewhat prejudicing those inquiries in regions where physics 

 and chemistry touch hands, which in these latter days are pro- 

 <lucing such striking results. 



In the d.ays of Huxley's studentship neither of these sciences 

 jiresented such a body of truths as could be readily used as an 

 engine of mental training, nor had tlie educational mechanism 

 for thus employing them been developed ; a chemical laboratory 

 for the student w-as as yet hardly known, a physical one wholly 

 unknown. The profession turned to these sciences chiefly for 

 the utility of the facts contained in them. The facts of physics, 

 with the exception of those of mechanism, were but rarely 

 appealed to, and if those of chemistry were in more common use, 

 it was because they threw light on the mysteries of the Pharma- 

 copoeia, rather than because they helped to solve the problems of 

 the living body. Hence the authority, not without cause, 

 demanded of the student no physics at all, and asked for 

 chemistry only in the midst of his course, when its facts might 

 help him to understand the nature of the drugs which his 

 clinical studies were already bidding him use. 



As regarils the biological sciences, the time was also one of 

 change, or rather of impending change ; the causes of the change 

 were at work, but for the most part were at work below the 

 surface ; their effects had not yet become obvious. 



In natural history, in what we sometimes now call biology, 

 in botany, zoology, and comparative anatomy, the activity in 

 systematic and descriptive work was great. The sun of the 

 great Cuvier was setting, but that of our own Richard Owen 

 was at its zenith ; new animal forms, recent and extinct, were 

 (Utily being described, the deep was giving up its treasures, new- 

 plants and new beasis, brought home by energetic travellers, were 

 being duly investigated. But this was only a continuation of 

 what had been going on long before. 



Of the great biologic revolution which was about to come, 

 NO. 1407, VOL. 54I 



there was not so much as even a sign in the skies when Huxley 

 took his seat on the Charing Cross benches, though Charles 

 Darwin was already brooding over the ideas which had come to 

 him in his long voyage. 



Two great changes, however, were already beginning — one due 

 to new ideas, the other to improved methods. 



The morphological conceptions, of which von Baer, in his 

 " History of Development," had laid the foundations, destined to 

 make a new science of animal forms, were being cairied forward 

 by Johannes Mtiller in Germany, though, save for the expositions 

 of Carpenter, they had made but little way in this country. 

 Nowhere, indeed, had they progressed far. The man who, 

 perhaps to Huxley himself, was to advance them most, 

 Gegenbaur, was as yet a mere student. Nor in spite of the 

 beginning made by von Baer himself, by Allen Thomson, and 

 l)y Rathke, had embryology made much progress. Kolliker, 

 to whom the science owes so much, had as yet written no line. 

 Still the new ideas were beginning to push. 



Of no less im|)ortance was the impulse given by the improve- 

 ments in the microscope. Only ten years before Sharpey, dis- 

 covering that eminently microscopic mechanism ciliary action, 

 found that a simple lens was a much more trustworthy tool than 

 the then compound microscope. But in the ten years a great 

 change had taken place, and during the latter part, especially, of 

 the decennium, improved instruments yielded a rich harvest of 

 discovery in animal and vegetable life. Prominent among the 

 new additions to truth was increased knowledge of the 

 mammalian ovum, in acquiring which Wharton Jones, Huxley's 

 teacher at Charing Cross, did much. But the most momentous 

 and epoch-making step w-as the promulgation of the cell-theory 

 by Schwann and Schleiden as the decennium drew to its close, 

 and more or less connected with that step was the accurate 

 description by von Mohl of the structure of the vegetable cell, 

 and his introduction of the word, which, next to the word cell, 

 has perhaps had the most profound influence on the progress of 

 biologic science — I mean the word protoplasm. 



Of this wide field of general biologic knowledge the College 

 of Surgeons at that time took no heed, or at least made no 

 formal demand. It is true that part of it found its place in the 

 lectures on Anatomy and Physiology, and in the consequent 

 examinations, but only a small part. It is also true that the 

 lecturer on Materia Medica had by custom license to roam over 

 almost the whole of nature, and the student in learning ithc 

 nature and use of drugs took doses of heterogeneous natural 

 history ; the mention, for instance, in the Pharmacopoeia of 

 Castoreum being made the occasion of a long disquisition on 

 the biology of the beaver. 



But in this the end in view was the acquisition of facts, not 

 training in scientific conceptions and ways of thought. 



The botany, it is true, which unasked for by the College of 

 Surgeons, was insisted ujion by the Company of Apothecaries, 

 though made compulsory on utilitarian grounds, as an appendage 

 to and introduction to the Pharmaco|)a;ia, did serve the student 

 in an educational way, teaching him how to appreciate like- 

 nesses and differences, even small ones, and how to distinguish 

 between real and superficial resemblances. But the time he 

 spent on this was too brief to make it — save in cases where a 

 special enthu.siasm stepped in — of any notable effect. 



Of the then conditions of that biologic science which comes 

 closest to the profession of physiology, I will venture to say a 

 few words, though I will strive to curb ray natural tendency to 

 dwell on it at too great a length. 



A great master — Johannes Midler— had a few years before 

 written a great work, " The Outlines of Physiology," a work 

 which the wise physiologist consults with profit even to-daj', 

 noting with admiration how a clear strong judgment may steer 

 its way through the dangers of the unknown, and the still worse 

 perils of the half-known. A study of that work teaches us the 

 nature and extent of the advanced physiology, which at that d.ay 

 an accomplished teacher like Wharton Jones might put before 

 an eager student like Huxley, and we may infer what the 

 ordinary teachgr put before the ordinary student, each perhaps 

 then, as .since, eager neither to give nor to take more than the 

 statutory minimum. 



When we look into the past of science, and trace out the first 

 buddings of what afterwards grow to be umbrageous branches, 

 it sometimes seems as if every time, and atmost every year, 

 marked an epoch ; it seems as if always some one was finding 

 out something which gathered into greatness as the following 

 years rolled on. But even bearing this caution in mind, the 

 end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties of the present 



