Mabch 1, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



333 



full professorship of physiology had been 

 established in the Harvard Medical School 

 in 1876, and that a brilliant young phy- 

 siologist, one of Foster's own pupils, in the 

 same year assumed the professorship of 

 biology at Johns Hopkins. And yet I dis- 

 tinctly remember how strange and how 

 full of chemistry and physics the first edi- 

 tion of Foster's physiology seemed as it 

 was shown to me in 1876 by my professor 

 of comparative anatomy, and also how two 

 years later I studied physiology in the 

 medical school of one of our leading uni- 

 versities for a whole season, under a young 

 physician of more than ordinary ability 

 and promise, without once seeing a demon- 

 stration—still less doing an experiment. 

 The class simply recited, — upon so many 

 pages of Dalton's 'Human Physiology.' 



All this was the more remarkable be- 

 cause, according to Dr. (now President) G. 

 Stanley Hall, physiology was at that very 

 time " 'The' German Science"— a fact 

 stated and emphasized by Dr. Hall by the 

 title of one of a series of contemporary 

 essays which, re-read to-day, almost cause 

 one to regret that the author abandoned 

 the career of literature for that of admin- 

 istration. (Cf. 'Aspects of German Cul- 

 ture,' by G. Stanley Hall, 1881.) 



Physiology, saya Dr. Hall, has been character- 

 ized as just now preeminently the (jerman science. 

 This is probably true, whether it means that Grer- 

 man physiologic methods and results are less 

 known in other countries than those of other sci- 

 ences, or that they reflect more peculiarly the 

 national characteristics. Till Foster's text-book 

 appeared, very little was known in England and 

 America of German physiology, save by specialists 

 who themselves had studied in Germany. * * » 

 Fick terms physiology ' the highest and most fruit- 

 ful generalization of the collective natural sci- 

 ences.' Czermak, who devoted his wealth to build- 

 ing and equipping a magnificent laboratory and 

 lecture room and his time to the end of his life 

 to the popularization of physiology, was never 

 weary of insisting that it should be taught in 

 every high school. Once more, evolution in the 

 sense of Darwin or Haeckel is far from being a 



finality for the physiologist. It is for him rather 

 a morphological assumption that all animals and 

 men belong to one family; and he defines his sci- 

 ence with Pfliiger as the chemistry and physics of 

 living matter. 



Physiology in Great Britain and America 

 had, in fact, so far lagged behind that the 

 publication of Foster's text-book with its 

 revelation of some of the German physi- 

 ology of the day created a real sensation. 

 In the English-speaking countries mor- 

 phology was everywhere the fashion and 

 biologists, whether botanists or zoologists, 

 were then, almost without an exception, 

 morphologists. Even ten years after 

 Foster's book appeared, Huxley, who had 

 himself previously defined the grand divi- 

 sions of biology as morphology and physi- 

 ology rather than zoology and botany, 

 speaks of zoology, in his Queen's jubilee 

 essay on 'The Progress of Science' (1887), 

 as if this were really morphology when he 

 writes : " It is only in the present epoch that 

 zoology and physiology have yielded any 

 great aid to pathology and hygiene." 



When Foster's text-book appeared de- 

 scriptive zoology and embryology were 

 already rivals in popularity, and the ap- 

 pearance in 1880 of Balfour's 'Compara- 

 tive Embryology' made this subject for 

 zoologists almost a passion. And yet 

 to-day Balfour's then fascinating work 

 seems strangely descriptive and somewhat 

 overanxious after merely structural 

 homologies. In his 'Introduction' Bal- 

 four, while defining embryology as cover- 

 ing "the anatomy and physiology of the 

 organism during the whole period in- 

 cluded between its first coming into being 

 and its attainment of the adult state," is 

 careful to add : ' ' The present treatise deals 

 only with the embryology of animals, and 

 the science is moreover treated from the 

 morphological or anatomical rather than 

 the physiological side. ' ' So much was em- 

 biyology the fashion of the day that Foster 



