I.—PHYSIOLOGY. 129 
oxygen is used by the tissues of the body, its special relations to 
muscular contraction, the chemical results of that contraction, the 
thermal laws which it obeys—all these fundamental problems of living 
matter have seen the most significant steps to their solution taken 
within the past generation in this country. 
Work of this kind brings permanent enrichment to the intellectual 
life of mankind by giving new and fuller conceptions of the nature of 
the living organism. That we may think is its highest function; but 
it does more than this. Just as all gains in the knowledge of Nature 
bring increase of power, so these discoveries of the past fifty years 
have their place in the fixed foundations upon which alone the science 
and the arts of medicine now or in the future can be securely based. 
The special study of disease, its cure and prevention, has had notable 
triumphs here and elsewhere in the same half-century, and these as 
they come must make as a rule a more spectacular appeal to the 
onlooker. Yet it is the accumulating knowledge of the basal laws of 
life and of the living organism to which alone we can look for the 
‘sure establishment either of the study of disease or of the applied 
sciences of medicine. As we have seen, there are few indeed among 
the fields of inquiry in the whole range of physiology in which the 
British contributions to the common stock of ascertained knowledge 
or of fertile idea do not take a foremost place. It would be impiety 
not to honour, as it would be stupidity to ignore, these plain facts, 
which, indeed, are now perhaps more commonly admitted abroad than 
recognised at home. There is no occasion here for any spirit of national 
complacency—rather the reverse, indeed. British workers at no time 
earlier than the War have had the menial assistance or other resources 
which their colleagues in other countries have commonly commanded, 
and too often the secondary and relatively easy developments of pioneer 
_work done in this country have fallen to well-equipped and well-served 
workers elsewhere. If in the past half-century better support had been 
available from public or private sources, or at the older universities 
from college endowments, it is impossible for any well-informed person 
to doubt that a more extended, if not a more diversified, harvest would 
have been won. 
We stand too near to this remarkable epoch of progress to appraise 
it fairly. In the same span of years Nature has yielded many fresh 
secrets in the physical world under cross-examination by new devices 
which have themselves been lately won by patient waiting upon her. 
So great a revelation of physical truth has been lately made in this 
country, bringing conceptions of space and of matter so swiftly changing 
and extending, that our eyes are easily dimmed to the wonders of 
that other new world being unfolded to us in the exploration of the 
living organism. Only the lapse of time can resolve the true values of 
this or that direction of inquiry, if indeed there be any true calculus 
of ‘ value’ here at all. We seem to see in the progress of physiology, 
not at few but at many points, that we stand upon new paths just 
opening before us, which must certainly—as it seems—lead quickly to 
new light, to fuller vision, and to other paths beyond. The advances 
of the next half-century to come must far exceed and outshine thore 
