I.—PHYSIOLOGY. 127 
Consort, who, familiar with the progress of other countries, had lent 
his influence and sympathy to many men of science in their struggle 
against the insularity and apathy of the wealthy and governing classes 
of the earlier Victorian days. The curious may take note that the 
first outward mark of recognition given by the official and influential 
world to the existence of physiology as such was given not, as in other 
and poorer countries much earlier, by the endowment of some chair 
or institute for research and teaching, but by an act of symbolic repre- 
sentation. For, when the expensive statuary of the Albert Memorial 
was completed in 1871, it was found that ‘ Physiology,’ betokened by 
a female figure with a microscope, had been given its place among the 
primary divisions of learning and investigation acknowledged in that 
monument to the Prince. 
From Sharpey himself and his personal influence we may trace 
directly onwards the development of all the chief British schools of 
physiology whose achievements have in the past half-century restored 
Britain to more than her old pride of place in this form of service to 
mankind. We here fittingly acknowledge first the close link with 
Sharpey which we find to-day in Sir Edward Sharpey Schifer, 
who, after fruitful years in his old teacher’s place at University College, 
brought that personal tradition back to this great school of Edinburgh 
from whence it originally came. At University College itself the line 
has been continued with undimmed lustre by Starling and Bayliss and 
their colleagues to the present day. From Sharpey’s school] again are 
derived the great branches which have sprung from it, both at Oxford 
and at Cambridge. Burdon Sanderson, Sharpey’s immediate successor 
at University College, proceeded thence to Oxford and founded there, 
against many difficulties of prejudice and custom, the school of physi- 
ology which Gotch, Haldane, and Sherrington have nevertheless main- 
tained so brilliantly in succeeding years. To Cambridge, Michael 
Foster, one of Sharpey’s demonstrators, was invited in 1870 by Trinity 
College to be Praelector in Physiology and Fellow of the College. This 
enlightened and then almost unprecedented act, no less than the personal 
qualities of Foster that so aboundingly justified it, I would, as in 
private duty bound, hold here in special remembrance. Under Foster’s 
influence there came into being at Cambridge a strong and rapidly 
growing school of physiologists, from Langley, Gaskell, Sherrington, 
Hopkins, to numerous successors. There sprang from him, too, a new 
impetus to other subjects, through his pupils Francis Balfour and Adam 
Sedgwick to embryology and zoology, through Vines and Francis Darwin 
to botany, through Roy to pathology. From Foster again through 
Newell Martin, who, coming with him from London, had caught 
not only inspiration from him but some of his power of inspiring others, 
and who left Cambridge for a Chair at Baltimore in 1876, we may 
derive a large part of the growth and direction of physiology since 
that time in the United States and in Canada. The rapid progress 
of all these biological sciences at Cambridge within a single generation 
and the volume of original work poured forth depended, of course, upon 
two necessary conditions. The first is one which has never failed in 
this country—the existence of men fitted by temperament to advance 
