728 REPORT—1904. 
Section I.—PHYSIOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SEctIoN—Professor C, 8. SHERRINGTON, Sc.D., 
M.D., F.RS, 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Correlation of Reflexes and the Principle of the Common Path. 
Ir has been lightly said that this Association meets to cultivate less muses than 
amusements. The two are not incompatible, and here happily the muses number 
not merely nine, but ten; for we surely include among the muses ‘ Physiologia.,’ 
Here in Cambridge our muse admits frankly that a mistake has been made about 
Parnassus—it is not a mountain but a flat place, almost fenny, once worried by 
mosquitoes, and now immune from all worries. 
Perhaps the confusion between Parnassus and a mountain was due to the 
Gog-Magog hills. Those hills our muse has haunted and still haunts. She has 
votaries there ; among them one who instituted her worship in this place, a teacher 
whose powerful appeal attracted disciples from all sides, one whose enthusiasm 
was, moreover, never narrowed to a single science alone, but floods all biology. 
With Cambridge and Physiology the name of Sir Michael Foster rises to the lips 
as an indissoluble sequence. So it will ever be; and it must give him pleasure, 
as it gives us, to have for his successor here one of his first pupils, one associated 
far and wide with that which Physiology treasures as always golden, the discovery 
of imperishable facts. 
When this Section last met, two years ago, its President, Professor Halliburton, 
reviewed for us the existing position of chemical physiology. We cannot from 
the nervous system draw themes of such general attractiveness as the new 
biochemistry, with its startling reactions, its varied hypotheses, its toxophores, 
haptophores, amboceptors, and other fairylike agents. 
Physiology studies the nervous system from three main points of view. One 
of these regards its processes of nutrition. Nerve-cells, as all cells, lead individual 
lives, breathe, dispense their own stores of energy, repair their own substantial 
waste, are, in short, living units, each with a nutrition more or less centred in 
itself. The problems of nutrition of the nerve-cell and of the nervous system, 
though partly special to this specially differentiated form of cell life, are, on the 
whole, accessible to the same methods as is nutrition in other cells and in the 
body as a whole. 
But beside the essential functions common to all living cells, the cells of the 
nervous system present certain which are specialised. Among properties of living 
matter, one by its high development inthe nerve-cell may be said to characterise 
it. I mean the cell’s transmission of excitement spatially along itself and thence to 
other cells. This ‘conductivity ’ is the specific physiological property of nerye-cells 
wherever they exist. Its intimate nature is, therefore, a problem coextensive with 
the existence of nerve-cells, and enters as a factor into every question concerning 
the specific reactions of the nervous system, 
