TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 595 



■or zoo-ainyline). But, call it by what name we may, its discovery stands forth as 

 a great fundamental fact. It would be difficult to imagine a discovery more ex- 

 tended in its applications. In the course of his investigations on this subject, 

 Bernard showed the influence of diet, of digestion, of inanition upon this function 

 of the liver. He showed the influence of the nerves and nervous centres in rela- 

 tion to it. He made the important discovery of the production of diabetes artifi- 

 cially. He was led to discover a similar function as regards the formation of 

 amyloid substance on the placenta. He built up an entirely new theory of diabetes, 

 fundamentally changing the view hitherto held on this subject, and, in short, made 

 the whole held his own. 



It is obvious to every one who allows himself calmly to reflect for a moment, 

 that no physician can be a good practitioner who does not know something of the 

 work done and the duties performed by the heart, or the stomach, or the lungs, 

 etc., in a healthy state. Diseases are deviations from health ; to understand the 

 one it is necessary to know something of the other. It must appear quite puerile, 

 therefore, to any thinking person, the assertion that the discovery of an important 

 new function in a great organ like the liver did not modify the practice of medicine 

 and throw new light on disease, not of the liver alone, but throughout the whole 

 frame. You will pardon me, therefore, if I again express my doubts of the intelli- 

 gence or the honesty of those practitioners who treat contemptuously experimental 

 physiology and such work as has been achieved by men like Claude Bernard. 



Faust, in his great soliloquy, addressing the Sublime Spirit of good, says :— 

 « Thou didst not grant to me merely the cold gaze of open-mouthed astonishment. 

 Thou permittedst me to see into the depths of Nature as into the bosom of a 

 friend." 



It has been the lot, no doubt, of a few among those whom I address, to have 

 exhibited to some of their friends the circulation of the blood, as seen through the 

 microscope, in the web of the frog's foot. They will have been struck, no doubt, 

 as I have been, by the effect which this spectacle, when witnessed for the first time, 

 has on different observers. Some look upon it much as they would upon a clever 

 conjuring trick. It is to them no more than a transformation scene on the stage 

 is to a child. " How fast it goes," they say. They are astonished that anything 

 of the kind should go on in a frog. The cold unintelligent gaze of open-mouthed 

 wonderment is, perhaps, even too strong an expression for any emotion which stirs 

 them. Others there are who are struck dumb by the sight before them. One sees 

 at once that they have caught a glimpse of a boundless prospect— that they feel 

 it has been granted to them to see more deeply into the bosom of Nature than 

 they have ever done before. One perceives, to use again Goethe's words, that the 

 Sublime Spirit has not turned to them his countenance in vain. 



There is an anecdote which I have dreamed of— as true, perhaps, as many such 

 anecdotes are, yet full of beauty— that when Malpighi first showed to the Pope, 

 whose friend and physician he was, this marvellous sight, his Holiness, having con- 

 templated it for some moments in silence, raised his hands and eyes to heaven, 

 repeating the " Te Deum," then, kneeling, thanked God for having permitted him 

 to live to see so impressive a sight. " Is it indeed true," he asked, " that this won- 

 drous movement goes on within me and you and all men ? " Being told that 

 doubtless it was so, " Mirantur aliqui," he "said, using the words of St. Augustin, 

 " altitudines montium, ingentes fluctus maris, altissimos lapsus fluminum et° gyros 

 siderum :—relinquunt seipsos nee mirantur ! " Apparently, Pope Innocent XI. 

 viewed with less jealousy and suspicion than many ecclesiastics are wont to do, 

 those divine writings traced on the face of Nature (too little studied by the theo- 

 logian), the interpretation and decipherment of which is the province and the plea- 

 sure of the man of science. 



I have been led to this reflection, as it appears to me to explain the difference 

 between various individuals when contemplating some new disclosure in natural 

 science ; it illustrates the fashion in which the discovery to which I next allude is 

 viewed by different classes of minds. A small filament of nerve, no thicker than a 

 tiny silken thread, is divided in a rabbit's neck. Immediately a change is observed 

 in the pupil of the eye on the same side. The ear on that side is felt to be obviously 

 hotter than the other; the blood-vessels on that side of the head throb and contain 



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