OCTOBER 22, 1897.] 
and the sixties of the century, one promi- 
nent inquirer alone seems to be left, Albert 
you KGlliker, who in his old age is doing 
work of which even he in his youth might 
have been proud. The thirteen years 
which have swept the others away seem to 
mark a gulf between the physiological 
world of to-day and that of the time in 
which most of their work was done. 
They are gone, but they have left behind 
their work and their names. May they of 
the future, as I believe we of the present are 
doing, take up their work and their ex- 
ample, doing work other than theirs but 
after their pattern, following in their steps. 
In the thirteen years during which these 
have passed away physiology has not been 
idle. Indeed, the more we look into the 
period the more it seems to contain. 
The study of physiology, as of other sci- 
ences, though it may be stimulated by diffi- 
culties (and physiology has the stimulus of 
a special form of opposition unknown to 
other sciences), expands under the sun- 
shine of opportunity and aid. And it may 
be worth while to compare the oppor- 
tunities for study of physiology in 1884 
with those in 1897. At this meeting of the 
British Association I may fitly confine 
myself, I was going to say, to British 
matters ; but I feel at this point, as others 
have felt, the want of a suitable nomen- 
clature. We who are gathered here to-day 
have, with the exception of a few honored 
guests from the Eastern Hemisphere, one 
common bond, one common token of unity, 
and, so far as I know, one only; I am 
speaking now of outward tokens; down 
deeper in our nature there are, I trust, yet 
others. Weall speak the English tongue. 
Some of us belong to what is called Great 
Britain and Ireland, others to that which 
is sometimes spoken of as Greater Britain. 
But there are others here who belong to 
neither ; though English in tongue, they are 
in no sense British. To myself, to whom 
SCIENCE. 
603 
the being English in speech is a fact of far 
deeper moment than any political bound- 
ary, and who wish at the present moment 
to deal with the study of physiology among 
all those who speak the English tongue, 
there comes the great want of some word 
which will denote all such. I hope, indeed 
I think, that others feel the same want too. 
The term Anglo-Saxon is at once pedantic 
and incorrect, and yet there is none other ; 
and, in the absence of such a better term, 
I shall be forgiven if I venture at times to 
use the seemingly narrow word English as 
really meaning something much broader 
than British in its very broadest sense. 
Using English in this sense, I may, I 
think, venture to say that the thirteen 
years which separate 1884 from to-day 
have witnessed among English people a de- 
velopment of opportunities for physiolog- 
ical study such as no other like period has 
seen. It is not without significance that 
only a year or two previous to this period, 
in England proper, in little England, 
neither of the ancient Universities of Ox- 
ford and Cambridge, which, historically at 
least, represent the fullest academical as- 
pirations of the nation, possessed a chair 
of physiology; the present professors, who 
are the first, were both appointed in 1888. 
Up to that time the science of physiology 
had not been deemed worthy, by either 
university, of a distinctive professorial me- 
chanism. The act of these ancient institu- 
tions was only a manifestation of modern 
impulses, shared also by the metropolis 
and by the provinces at large. Whereas 
up to that time the posts for teaching phys- 
iology, by whatever name they were called, 
had been in most cases held by men whose 
intellectual loins were girded for other pur- 
poses than physiology, and who used the 
posts as stepping-stones for what they con- 
sidered better things, since that time, as 
each post became vacant, it had almost inva- 
riably been filled by men wishing and pur- 
