140 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
subject of university study, shows how this freedom has multiplied the 
gifts which physiclogy has had it in her power to return to her ancient 
mother. There can be no dissolving of the ties between one and the 
other, but we must see to it that these ties are well adjusted and that 
there shall be no ‘ ill-assorted union’ between the two. 
In the rapid growth of medical schools throughout the English- 
speaking world there are present signs that the essential part which 
physiology plays in medical education and study may wrongly 
masquerade as the only service physiology has to give to man, and may 
appear to fill the measure of her rightful status. In more than one of 
the great American universities physiology is treated either in theory or 
in practice as a subject within the Medical Faculty to be housed within 
the Medical School, yet at the same time not as a subject in the Faculty of 
Arts or of Science, nor to be studied alone or with other sciences as 
part of a liberal and non-professional education. It is rare in the 
United States for physiology to be studied by any but professed medical 
students, and there is some reason to think that it is becoming rarer 
in Great Britain than it was a few years ago. 
To my mind this tendency is to be deplored. It implies a reversal 
of that growth of physiology in freedom which began half a century 
ago and from which such good fruit has already been gathered. It has 
two chief evils among its inevitable results. Removed from its position 
among other university subjects by geographical separation that in 
some universities amounts to transportation and exile, it is deprived of 
the kinship and co-operation of the sciences touching its own boun- 
daries—those of zoology, embryology, and botany, of agriculture, of 
psychology, of physics and chemistry. Assigned, if not limited, to a 
place in the medical curriculum, it is apt to be narrowed in its claims 
and outlook, and to lose not only its proper neighbours, but even parts 
of itself, whittled away in the organisation of a purely medical pro- 
gramme in the guise of pharmacology, neurology, toxicology, and the 
like, for which special funds may be available, separate places in the 
time-table reserved, and independent departments provided. But a 
second evil strikes more deeply. Any arrangements that give in effect 
a restriction of physiological studies to medical students alone must be 
doubly injurious. It is injurious to the general course of education, 
because it tends to cut away from the other university students the 
opportunity of possessing themselves, either as a primary or secondary 
study, of the knowledge and discipline of physiology which has edu- 
cative value in the highest degree for the cultural or the practical sides of 
living. And here, secondarily, we may notice the loss to an applied 
study only less in importance to that of medicine; I mean the science 
and practice of agriculture. It is injurious, again, to physiology itself, — 
because we know well from reiterated experience how many promising 
recruits for the future advancement of the subject have been brought to 
it, often, as it were, by chance, in the course of their university life, 
attracted to it whether from classical studies or mathematical, or from 
other branches of natural science. A notable number of the. chief 
leaders in the science of the past and present generation have so been 
attracted, without any previous thought of medical studies. as such 
