802 KEPORT— 1897. 



In the past thirteen years we may recognise hoth these kinds of progress. Of 

 the fortner kind I might take, as an example, the time-honoured problems of the 

 mechanics of the circulation. In spite of the labour which has been spent on these 

 in times of old, something always remains to be done, and the last thirteen years 

 have not been idle. The researches of Hiirthle and Tigerstedt, of Eoy and Adami, 

 not to mention others, have left us wiser than we were before. So again, with the 

 also old problems of muscular contraction, progress, if not exciting, has been real ; 

 we are some steps measurably nearer an understanding what is the exact nature of 

 the fundamental changes which bring about contraction and what are the relations 

 of those changes to the structure of muscular fibre. In respect to another old 

 problem, too, the beat of the heart, we have continued to creep nearer and nearer 

 to the full light. Problems again, the method of attacking which is of more 

 recent origin, such as the nature of secretion, and the allied problem of the nature 

 of transudation, have engaged attention and brought about that stirring of the 

 waters of controversy which, whatever be its eflects in other departments of life, 

 is never in science wholly a waste of time, if indeed it be a waste of time at all, 

 since, in matters of science, the tribunal to which the combatants of both sides 

 appeal is always sure to pive a true judgment in the end. In the controversy 

 thus arisen, the last word has perhaps not yet been said, but whether we tend at 

 present to side with Heidenhain, who has continued in+o the past thirteen years 

 the brilliant labours which were perhaps the distinguishing features of physiolo- 

 gical progress in preceding periods, and who in his present sufferings carries with 

 him, I am sure, the sympathies if not the hopes of all his brethren, or whether 

 we are more inclined to join those who hold different views, we may all agree 

 in saying that we have, in 1897, distinctly clearer ideas of why secretion gathers 

 in an alveolus or lymph in a lymph space than we had in 1884. 



I might multiply such examples of progress on more or less old lines until I 

 wearied you ; but I will try not to do so. I wish rather to dwell for a few minutes 

 on some of what seem to be the salient new features of the period under review. 



One such feature is, I venture to think, the development of what may perhaps 

 be called the new physiological chemistry. We always are, and for a long time 

 always have been, learning something new about the chemical phenomena of living 

 beings. During the years preceding those immediately recent, great progress, for 

 which we have especially, perhaps, to thank Kiibne, was made in our knowledge 

 of the bodies which we speak of as proteids and their allies. But while admitting 

 to the full the high value of all these researches, and the great light which they 

 threw on many of the obscurer problems of the chemical changes of the body, 

 such, for instance, as the digestive changes and the clotting of blood, it could not 

 but be felt that their range was restricted and their value limited. Granting the 

 extreme usefulness of being able to distinguish bodies though theirsolution or precipi- 

 tation by means of this or that salt or acid, this did not seem to promise to throw 

 much light on the all-important problem as to what was the connection between the 

 chemical constitution of such bodies and their work in the economy of a living 

 being. For it need not be argued that this is an all-important problem. To day, 

 as yesterday and as in the days before, the mention of the word vitalism or its 

 equivalent separates as a war-cry physiologists into two camps, one contending 

 that all the phenomena of life can, and the other that they cannot, be explained as 

 the result of the action of chemico-physical forces. For myself, I have always felt 

 that while such a controversy, like other controversies as I ventured to say just 

 now, is useful as a stirring of the waters, through which much oxygen is brought 

 home to many things and no little purification effected, the time for the final 

 judgment on the question will not come until we shall more clearly understand 

 than we do at present what we mean by physical and chemical, and may perhaps 

 be put off until somewhere near the end of all things, when we shall know as fuUy 

 as we ever shall what the forces to which we give these names can do and what 

 they cannot. Meanwhile the great thing is to push forward, so far as may be, 

 the chemical analysis of the phenomena presented by living beings. Hitherto the 

 physiological chemists, or the chemical physiologists as perhaps they ought rather 

 to be called have perhaps gone too much their own gait, and Lave seemed to be 



