96 REPouT— 1870. 



It was upon tlie solid ground that Antoeua 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, I beg to say that the word Bio- 

 logy 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 cur- 

 rently 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, first. Animal and Vegetable Physiology and Ana- 

 tomy; secondly, Ethnology and Anthropology; 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 gi-eat 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 instnmieuts, have been increased at the rate 

 at which it is now being, year by year, increased ; and the entire mass of actually 

 existing 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 if any body should pretend that his own stock of infor- 

 mation 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 be- 

 fore such an assembly as this. As will have been expected, 1 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 

 present 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 p.apers and, I am happy to add, the circle of faces around us suggest 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 organized parti- 

 cles in the production of disease ; that of the influence of particular nervous and 

 chemical agencies upon functions ; that of the localization of cerebral functions ; 

 that of the production and, indeed, of the entire rvie 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 considerations. Truth 

 is one ; all roads 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. 50-68, and appears to have been uttered by 

 him, set. 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 considera- 

 tions." My second quotation shall be taken from the great work of one of the 

 first, as I apprehend, of living theologians, John Macleod Campbell, * The Nature 

 of the Atonement,' pp. xxxii, xxxiii, Introd., and it rims 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 

 tnem to ask for a kind of evidence not proper to the subject, and so hindering their 



