Mat 26, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



553 



in 1870 by Trinity College to be prselectoi- in 

 physiology and fellow of the college. This en- 

 lightened 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 re- 

 membrance. 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 Sedg- 

 wick 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 Cam- 

 bridge within a single generation, and the vol- 

 ume of original work poured forth depended, 

 of course, upon two necessary conditions. The 

 first is one which has never failed in this coun- 

 try — the existence of men fitted by temperament 

 to advance knowledge by experiment. The 

 second has been the supply of living necessities 

 through the ancient endowments of the colleges, 

 and these in the Cambridge of the last half- 

 century have been freely and increasingly used 

 in catholic spirit for the increase of any of the 

 borders of knowledge. 



If these have been the chief lines of descent 

 along which our present heritage has come to 

 us, as mind has influenced mind and the light 

 has been passed from hand to hand, what has 

 been the outcome as we look back over the 

 half -century to those small beginnings! 



Truly we can say that the workers in this 

 counti^y have in that short space of years laid 

 the whole world under a heavy debt. In what- 

 ever dii'eetion we look we seem to see that in 

 nearly all the great primary fields of psysi- 

 ological knowledge the root ideas from which 

 further growth is now springing are in great 

 part British in origin, and based upon the work 



of British experimenters. If we consider the 

 blood circulation we find that our essential 

 ideas of the nature of the heart-beat were estab- 

 lished by Gaskell, and that other first principles 

 of its dynamics and of its regulation have been 

 laid down by successors to him still with us; 

 that the intricate nervous regulation of the 

 arterial system has had its chief analyses here, 

 and that here have been made more recently 

 the first demonstrations of the part played by 

 the minute capillary vessels in the regulation 

 of the distribution and composition of the 

 blood. Of the central nervous system the mod- 

 ern conceptions of function in terms of the 

 purposive integration of diverse impulses along 

 determined paths have sprung direct from 

 British work, while the elementary analysis of 

 the structure and functions of the sympathetic 

 nervous system has been almost wholly British 

 in idea and in detail. As with the nervous 

 regulation of the body, so with the chemical 

 regulation of function by traveling substances 

 — the so-called "hormones," or stimulants from 

 organ to organ — this, too, is a British concep- 

 tion enriched by numerous examples drawn 

 from experimental work in this country. In 

 the study of nutrition, of the primary "food- 

 stuffs," proteins, carbohydrates, fats, salts and 

 water, whose names in their supposedly secure 

 sufficiency were written with his own hand by 

 Foster upon the blackboard shown in his por- 

 trait by Mr. John Collier, to typify, as we may 

 imagine, a basal physiological truth, we have 

 come to learn that these alone are not sufficient 

 for growth and life in the absence of minimal 

 amounts of accessory unknown and unstable 

 substances, the so-called "vitamins," which are 

 derived from pre-existent living matter. This 

 conception, undreamt of to the end of the nine- 

 tenth centurj', has fundamental value in medi- 

 cine and in agriculture, and has already begun 

 to bear a harvest of practical fruit of which 

 the end can not be seen or the beneficence 

 measured. This discovery stands to our na- 

 tional credit, and large parts of its develop- 

 ment and application have been due to recent 

 British work. If we turn to the regulation of 

 respiration and its close adaptation to body 

 needs, that also, as it is now known to the 

 world, is known as British labors have revealed 



