30 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS, 
they are necessary ; and it is the business of the physiologist to seek out 
and demonstrate the action of those laws in every vital action. 
This is clearly recognised by the leaders, and in the definition of 
Physiology by Burdon Sanderson he definitely limited it to the study 
of ‘ ascertainable characters of a chemical and physical type.’ In his 
Address to the Sub-section of Anatomy and Physiology at York in 1881 
he spoke as follows :— 
‘ It would give you a true idea of the nature of the great advance 
which took place about the middle of this century if I were to 
define it as the epoch of the death of “‘ vitalism.’’ Before that 
time even the greatest biologists—e.g. J. Miiller—recognised that 
the knowledge biologists possessed both of vital and physical 
phenomena was insufficient to refer both to a common measure. 
The method, therefore, was to study the processes of life in 
relation to each other only. Since that time it has become funda- 
mental in our science not to regard any vital process as understood 
at all unless it can be brought into relation with physical standards, 
and the methods of physiology have been based exclusively on 
this principle. The most efficient cause [conducing to the 
change] was the progress which had been made in physics and 
chemistry, and particularly those investigations which led to the 
establishment of the doctrine of the Conservation of 
inergy.” 0. 
‘Investigators who are now working with such earnestness 
in all parts of the world for the advance of physiology, have 
before them a definite and well-understood purpose, that purpose 
being to acquire an exact knowledge of the chemical and physical 
processes of animal life and of the self-acting machinery by which 
they are regulated for the general good of the organism. The 
more singly and straightforwardly we direct our efforts to these 
ends, the sooner we shall attain to the still higher purpose—the 
effectual application of our knowledge for the increase of human 
happiness.’ 
Professor Gotch, whose recent loss we have to deplore, puts it more 
strongly :— 
“It is essentially unscientific,’ he says, ‘to say that any 
physiological phenomenon is caused by vital force.’ 
I observe that by some critics I have been called a vitalist, and in 
a sense I am; but I am not a vitalist if vitalism means an appeal to an 
undefined ‘ vital force’ (an objectionable term I have never thought 
of using) as against the laws of Chemistry and Physics. Those laws 
must be supplemented, but need by no means be superseded. The 
