798 REPORT— 1897. 



Section I. — PHYSIOLOGY, including Experimental Pathology and 

 Experimental Psychology. 



President of the Section — Professor Michael Foster, 

 M.D., Sec. R.S. 



THURSDAT, AUGUST 19. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



We who have come from the little island on the other side of the great waters 

 to take part in this important gatherbg of the British Association, have of 

 late been much exercised in retrospection. We have been looking back on the 

 sixty years reign of our beloved Sovereign, and dwelling on what has happened 

 during her gracious rule. We have, perhaps, done little in calling to mind the 

 wrongs, the mistakes and the failures of the Victorian era ; but our minds and our 

 mouths have been full of its achievements and its progress ; and each of us, of 

 himself or through another, has been busy in bringing back to the present the 

 events of more than half a century of the past. It was while I, with others, 

 was in this retrospective mood that the duty of preparing some few words 

 to say to you to day seemed suddenly to change from an impalpable cloud in the 

 far distance to a heavy burden pressing directly on the back ; and in choosing 

 something to say I have succumbed to the dominant influence. Before putting 

 pen to paper, however, I recovered sufficiently to resist the temptation to add one 

 more to the many reviews which have appeared of the progress of physiology 

 during the Victorian era. I also rejected the idea of doing that for which I find 

 precedents in past presidential addresses — namely, of attempting to teU what has 

 been the history of the science to which a Section is devoted during the brief 

 interval which has elapsed since the Section last met ; to try and catch physiology, 

 or any other science, as it rushes through the brief period of some twelve months 

 seemed to me not unlike photographing the flying bullet without adequate appara- 

 tus ; the result could only be either a blurred or a delusive image. But I bethought 

 me that this is not the first, we hope it will not be the last, time that the 

 British Association has met in the Western Hemisphere ; and though the events 

 of the thirteen years which have slipped by since the meeting at Montreal in 1884 

 might seem to furnish a very slender oat on which to pipe a presidential address, 

 I have hoped that I might be led to sound upon it some few notes which might be 

 listened to. 



And indeed, though perhaps when we come to look into it closely almost every 

 period would seem to have a value of its own, the past thirteen years do, in a 

 certain sense, mark a break between the physiology of the past and that of the 

 future. When the Association met at Montreal in 1884, Darwin, whose pregnant 

 ideas have swayed physiology in the limited sense of that word, as well as that 

 broader study of living beings which we sometimes call biology, as indeed they 

 have every branch of natural knowledge, had been taken from us only some two 

 years before, and there were still alive most of the men who did the great works 

 of physiology of the middle and latter half of this century. The gifted Claude 



