OCTOBER 22, 1897. | 
This great and significant progress we 
owe, I venture to say, to Golgi, to the 
method introduced by him; and I for one 
cannot help being glad that this important 
contribution to. science, as well as another 
contingent and most valuable one, the de- 
generation method of Marchi, should be 
among the many tokens that Italy, the 
mother of all sciences in times gone by, is 
now once more taking her right place in 
scientific no less than in political life. We 
owe, I say, this progress to Golgi in the 
sense that the method introduced by him 
was the beginning of the new researches. 
We owe, moreover, to Golgi not the mere 
technical introduction of the method, but 
something more. He himself pointed out 
the theoretical significance of the results 
which his method produced; and if in this 
he has been outstripped and even corrected 
by others, his original merit must not be 
allowed to be forgotten. ‘Those others are 
many,in many lands. ‘The first, perhaps, 
was Frithiof Nansen, whose brief but brill- 
jiant memoir makes us selfish physiologists 
regret that the icy charms of the North Pole 
so early froze in him the bubbling springs 
of histological research. Of the rest two 
names stand out conspicuous. If rejuvenes- 
- cent Italy invented this method, another 
ancient country, whose fame, once brilliant 
in the past, like that of Italy, suffered in 
later times an eclipse, produced the man 
who, above all others, has showed us how 
to use it. At the meeting at Montreal a 
voice from Spain telling of things physio- 
logical would have seemed a voice erying 
-out of the wilderness ; to-day the name of 
Ramon-y-Cayal is in every physiologist’s 
mouth. That is one name, but there is yet 
another. Years ago, when those of us who 
are now veterans and see signs that it is 
time for us to stand aside were spelling out 
the primer of histology, one name was al- 
ways before us as that of a man who touched 
every tissue and touched each well. It is 
SCIENCE. 
611 
a consoling thought to some of the elder 
ones that histological research seems to be 
an antidote to senile decay. As the com- 
panion of the young Spaniard in the preg- 
nant work on the histology of the central 
nervous system done in the eighties and the 
nineties of the century, must be named the 
name of the man who was brilliant in the 
fifties, Albert von Kolliker. 
When I say that the progress of our 
knowledge of the central nervous system 
during the past thirteen years has been 
largely due to the application of the method 
of Golgi, I do not mean that it, alone and 
by itself, has done what has been done. 
That is not the way of science. Almost 
every thrust forward in science is a result- 
ant of concurrent forces working along dif- 
ferent lines ; and in most cases at least sig- 
nificant progress comes when efforts from 
different quarters meet and join hands. 
And especially as regards methods it is true 
that their value and effect depend on their 
coming at their allotted times. As I said 
above, neither experimental investigation 
nor clinical observation nor histological in- 
quiry by the then known methods had been 
idle before 1880. They had, moreover, 
borne even notable fruits, but one thing 
was lacking for their fuller fruition. The 
experimental and clinical results all postu- 
lated the existence of clear definite paths 
for impulses within the central nervous 
system, of paths moreover which, while 
clear and sharp, were manifold and, under 
certain conditions, alternate or even vicari- 
ous, and were so constructed that the im- 
pulses as they swept along them underwent 
from time to time—that is, at some place 
or other—transformations or at least 
changes in nature. But the methods of 
histological investigations available before 
that of Golgi, though they taught us much, 
failed to furnish such an analysis of the 
tangle of gray and white matter as would 
clearly indicate the paths required. This 
