TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 5) 
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 withhold- 
ing of money which (to use another metaphor) is no less the sinews of the war of 
science against ignorance than of other less glorious campaigns. Surely men 
engaged in the scientific profession may advocate the claim of science to main- 
tenance and needful pecuniary provision! It seems to me that we should, if 
necessary, 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 Imowledge is languishing, that able men are 
drawn 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 past century. The microscope, 
which was a drawing-room toy a hundred years ago, has, in the hands of devoted 
and gifted students of nature, been the means of giving us knowledge which, on 
the one hand, has saved thousands of surgical patients from terrible pain and death, 
and, on the other hand, has laid the foundation of that new philosophy with which 
the name of Darwin will for ever be associated. When Ehrenberg and, later, 
Dujardin described and figured the various forms of Monas, Vibrio, Spirillum, and 
Bacterium which their microscopes revealed to them, no one could predict that 
fifty years later these organisms would be recognised as the cause 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. Yet this is the result which the assiduous studies of the 
biologists, provided with laboratories and maintenance by continental States, have 
in due time brought to light. Theodore Schwann, professor at Liége, first showed 
that these Bacteria are the cause of the putrefaction of organic substances, and 
subsequently the French chemist Pasteur, professor in the Ecole Normale of Paris, 
confirmed 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 can 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 method to destroy by means of 
special poisons the putrefactive organisms which necessarily find their way into 
the neighbourhood of a wound, or of the surgeon’s Imife and dressings, and to ward 
off by similar means the access of such organisms to the wounded surface. The 
amount of death, not to speak of the suffering short of death, which the knowledge 
of Bacteria gained by the microscope has thus averted is incalculable. 
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 consumption or phthisis is due to a para- 
sitic Bacterium (Bacillus), discovered two years since by Koch of Berlin, as the im- 
1883. LL 
