TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. DEPT. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 705 



probable that the sagittal suture was ancliylosed very early in the development 

 of the skull, and this circumstance would cause the skull to lengthen, to allow the 

 <?rowth of the brain to take place. The coronal and lambdoidal sutures are well- 

 developed. The skull will come under the class of Scaphocepbalic Crania. The 

 tubercles of the teeth are worn smooth, as is the case with the teeth in many of the 

 Homan skulls found near York. From the peculiarity of the teeth, and the skull 

 liaving been found along with Eoman remains, it is probably a Roman skull. 



DEPARTMENT OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 



•Chairman of the Department — Professor J. S. Burdon Sanderson, 

 M.D., LL.D., F.E.S. (Vice-President of the Section). 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1. 

 The Department did not meet. 



FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2. 



The Chairman delivered the following Address : — 



The Discoveries of the past Half-Century relating to Animal Motion. 



The two great branches of Biology with which we concern ourselves in this Section, 

 Animal Morphology and Physiology, are most intimately related to each other. 

 This arises from their having one subject of study — the living animal organism. 

 The difference between them lies in this, that whereas the studies of the anatomist 

 lead him to fix bis attention on the organism itself, to us physiologists it, and the 

 organs of which it is made up, serve only as vestigia, by means of which we investi- 

 gate the vital processes of which they are alike the causes and consequences. 



To illustrate this I will first ask you to imagine for a moment that you have 

 before you one of those melancholy remainders of what was once an animal — to wit, a 

 rabbit— which one sees t-xposed in the shops of poulterers. We have no hesitatioH 

 in recognising that remainder as being in a certain sense a rabbit ; but it is a very 

 miserable vestige of what was a few days ago enjoying life in some wood or warren, 

 or more likely on the sand-hills near Ostend. We may call it a rabbit if we like, 

 but it is only a remainder — not the thing itself 



The anatomical preparntion which I have in imagination placed before you, 

 although it has lost its inside and its outside, its integument and its viscera, still 

 retains the parts for which the rest existed. The final cause of an animal, 

 whether human or other, is muscular action, because it is by means of its muscles 

 that it maintains its external relations. It is by our muscles exclusively that we 

 act on each other. The articulate sounds by which I am addressing you are but 

 the results of complicated combinations of muscular contractions — and so are the 

 scarcely appreciable changes in your countenances by which I am able to judge 

 how much, or how little, what I am saying inteiests you. 



Consequently the main problems of physiolngy relate to muscular action, or, as 

 I have called it, animal motion. Thev may be divided into two — namely ( 1 J in 



1881. " z z 



