December 4, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



805 



with Dr. L. E. Shore, made an interesting 

 contribution to pharmacology/ showing that 

 chloroform lowers blood pressure by acting di- 

 rectly upon the heart, and not on the vaso- 

 motor center, as had hitherto been supposed. 

 GaskeU was an unassuming, sympathetic 

 character, and it is said that every physiolo- 

 gist who has worked in the Cambridge Lab- 

 oratory since its start was his personal friend. 

 His eminent colleague. Professor J. N. Lang- 

 ley, thus describes him: 



GaskeU cared little for public ceremonies, and 

 rarely attended the congresses whieli beset the path 

 of prominent scientific men. He loved to work 

 quietly, to cultivate his garden, to see his friends, 

 and to take a hand at whist or bridge. His house 

 at Great Shelford was a recognized meeting-place 

 for physiologists, and his frank and genial wel- 

 come will be an abiding recollection to all who 

 knew him. 



F. H. Gaerison 



Aemy Medical Museum 



DB. GASKELL'S WOSK ON ORGANIC EVO- 

 LUTION 



It is not with any idea of writing an appre- 

 ciation either of the man or of his work as a 

 whole that I venture to present this sketch. 

 His work within the limits of the narrower 

 field of physiology — the observations on the 

 effect of a rise in tension of the muscles upon 

 the caliber of the lymphatic vessels, the long 

 series of experiments upon the relation of the 

 vagus and accelerator nerves to the heart and 

 on cardiac muscle, the work on the nerves to 

 the salivary gland — ^has been dwelt upon by 

 others.^ I wish rather to call attention to some 

 of the unusual features, and their bearing on 

 the wider biological problems of the day. 



Gaskell's work on the origin of vertebrates 

 was begun under conditions that most inves- 

 tigators would consider unfavorable. His wife 

 became afflicted with an obscure nervous dis- 

 order, not diagnosed at that rather early date, 

 and his presence was required more and more 



7 Lancet, Lond., 1893, I., 386. 



iLangley, Nature, 1914, Vol. 94, No. 2343, p. 

 93. British, Medical Jcmrnal, 1914, No. 2804, p. 

 559. 



at his home. Not wishing to give up investi- 

 gation during his enforced absence from the 

 laboratory, and having his attention turned 

 toward the central nervous system, he began 

 to enquire into its origin and development in 

 the various animal phyla. Regarding the 

 nervous system as the fixed and permanent 

 structure in phylogenetic development, he con- 

 cluded that the alimentary tract might be the 

 thing to be made over in the transition from 

 the invertebrate with ventral nerve cord to 

 vertebrate with its dorsal nerve cord, and drew 

 up his scheme of the origin of the vertebrates 

 on this basis. Although GaskeU has brought 

 together a vast amount of evidence bearing on 

 this point,^ his theory has been treated with 

 scant courtesy by most morphologists. It is a 

 common occurrence to hear it glibly and vigor- 

 ously condemned by people who have never 

 read his book or weighed independently for 

 themselves the evidence adduced in support of 

 the theory. It is worthy of remark in this con- 

 nection that GaskeU was a pioneer worker in 

 a line which has led in very recent years to the 

 development of a large and important field in 

 the morphology of the central nervous system — 

 the field now included in the component theory 

 of nerves. And he has shown in a way which 

 has had its influence upon other theories of 

 the origin of vertebrates, that the older idea of 

 the formation of a new nervous system while 

 the alimentary tract remained intact in phy- 

 logeny is not an assumption to be made lightly. 

 But whether the theory of the origin of verte- 

 brates as he propounded it be right or wrong, 

 a matter which I venture to regard as still un- 

 settled, certain of Gaskell's conceptions of the 

 nature of fundamental biological processes are 

 firmly and surely grounded. It is of these that 

 I wish more particularly to speak. 



GaskeU recognized very clearly the impor- 

 tance of the role played by internal processes 

 in evolution. In 1910, he wrote: 



Now the formation of the Metazoa from the 

 Protozoa and the progress of the Metazoa up- 

 wards signifies that the separate units composing 



2 GaskeU, ' ' The Origin of Vertebrates, ' ' New 

 York and London, 1908. 



