August 23, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



209 



In this connection the maintenance of 

 museums should be especially favored, be- 

 cause, as has been shown, these, more than 

 any other public agency, are invitations to 

 the wealthy owners of private treasures, in 

 the form of collections, to give them in per- 

 petuity to the public. 



3 . If it be possible to sum up in a single 

 sentence the pi-inciples which have been 

 discussed in the present paper, that sen- 

 tence shoiild be phrased in these words: 



The degree of civilization to which 

 any nation, city oe province has at- 

 tained is well indicated by the charac- 

 ter of its public museums and the liber- 

 ality with which they are supported. 

 G. Brown Goode. 



U. S. National Museum. 



THE PROCESSES OF LIFE REVEALED BY THE 

 MICROSCOPE : A PLEA FOB PHYSIO- 

 LOGICAL HISTOLOGY* 



It is characteristic of the races of men 

 that almost at the dawn of reflection the 

 first question that presses for solution is 

 this one of life; life as manifested in men 

 and in the animals and plants around them. 

 What and whence is it and whither does it 

 tend? Then the sky with its stars, the 

 . earth with its sunshine and storm, light 

 and darkness, stand out like great mountain 

 peaks demanding explanation. So in the 

 life of every human being, repeating the 

 history of its race, as the evolutionists are 

 so fond of saying, the fundamental questions 

 are first to obtrude themselves upon the 

 growing intelligence. There is no waiting, 

 no delay for trifling with the simpler prob- 

 lems; the most fundamental and most com- 

 prehensive come immediately to the fore 

 and alone seem worthy of consideration. 

 But as age advances most men learn to ig- 

 nore the fundamental questions and to sat- 



* Presidential address delivered before the Ameri- 

 can Microscopical Society, Wednesday evening, Aug. 

 21, 1895. 



isfy themselves with simpler and more sec- 

 ondary matters as if the great realities were 

 all understood or non-existent. No doubt 

 to many a parent engaged in the affairs of 

 society, politics, finance, science or art, the 

 questions that their children put, like draw- 

 ing aside a thick curtain, bring into view 

 the fundamental questions, the great real- 

 ities; and we know again that what is ab- 

 sorbing the power and attention of our ma- 

 ture intellect, what perhaps in pride we feel 

 a mastery over, are only secondary matters 

 after all, and to the great questions of our 

 own youth, repeated with such earnestness 

 by our children, we must confess with hu- 

 mility that we still have no certain answers. 

 It behooves us then, if the main questions 

 of philosophy and science cannot be an- 

 swered at once, to attempt a more modest 

 task and by studying the individual factors 

 of the problem to hope ultimately to put 

 these together and thus gain some just 

 comprehension of the entire problem. 



This address is therefore to deal, not with 

 life itself, but with some of the processes or 

 phenomena which accompany its manifes- 

 tations. But it is practically impossible to 

 do fruitful work according to the Baconian 

 guide of piling observation on observation. 

 This is very liable to be a dead mass de- 

 void of the breath of life. It is a well 

 known fact that the author of the Novum 

 Organum, the key which Bacon supposed 

 would serve as the open-sesame of all diffi- 

 culties and yield certain knowledge, this 

 potent key did not unlock many of the 

 mysteries of science for its inventor. Ev- 

 ery truly scientific man since the world be- 

 gan has recognized the necessity of accu- 

 rate observation, and no scientific principle 

 has ever yet been discovered simply by 

 speculation ; but every one who has really 

 unlocked any of the mysteries of nature 

 has inspired, made alive his observations 

 by the imagination, he has, as Tyndall 

 so well put it, made a scientific use of the 



