126 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
their immediate contemporary, their work was aided by the direct 
interest and favour of the sovereign. But, during the eighteenth century 
and the earlier part of the nineteenth, eclipse fell upon the light that had 
thus burned so brightly, though isolated gleams shone here and there. 
James Jurin, under George II., applied the Newtonian principles to 
ealculating the work done by the heart and to other problems of the 
body, but his efforts to lay true and exact foundations for the study of 
disease were premature in the absence of experimental data. Stephen 
Hales, Chaplain to the future George III., made the first measure- 
ments of blood pressure in his garden at Teddington, and made many 
far-reaching observations of the first importance; but, as he wrote, 
there was indeed ‘ abundant room for many heads and hands to be 
employed in the work, for the wonderful and secret operations of 
Nature are so involved and intricate, so far out of the reach of our 
senses . . .’; and it was not then or till much later that many heads 
and hands were ready to be employed. Neither of these men had 
effective influence upon the thought or practical affairs of their day, 
either within the universities or outside them. 
Physiology, as we know it now in this country, took its shape 
in a new revival which may be reckoned as beginning half a century 
ago. All our chief schools may be said to derive their lineage from 
that new home of active and unshackled inquiry—I mean University 
College, in Gower Street, London—and from the influence there of 
an Edinburgh graduate, William Sharpey, who at the age of thirty- 
four was taken from the Edinburgh school to be Professor of Anatomy 
and Physiology. Here, from 1836 until 1874, Sharpey was inspiring 
a group of younger minds with his eager outlook. Already in France 
the new experimental study of the living functions was being established 
by Claude Bernard—that true ‘ father in our common science,’ as 
Foster later called him; already in Leipzig Ludwig, transmitting the 
impulse of Miuiller’s earlier labours, had founded that school of 
physiology which moulded the development of the subject in Germany 
and other countries, and had very strong early influence upon several 
of those who were later to become leaders with us. England had lost 
the pre-eminence that Stuart kings at all events had valued and pro- 
moted. Learning had become identified in English society with the 
mimetic use of the dead languages, and progress at the two univer- 
sities—even at the Cambridge of Newton, where mathematics kept 
independence of thought alive—was still impeded by the grip of ecclesias- 
tical tradition and by sectarian privilege. But at University College 
learning had been unfettered. Here Sharpey and his colleagues were 
in touch with the best progress in France and Germany, and here the 
organised study of physiology as a true branch of university study 
may be said to have begun. Its formal separation from anatomy came 
later and irregularly; a separate Chair of Physiology was not created 
at University College until 1874, nor at Cambridge or at Oxford until 
1883. 
We ought in piety to recognise that this tardy reflection of Conti- 
nental progress in our own subject, like parallel movements in other 
subjects, had in its early stages received invaluable aid from the Prince 
ee 
