EECENT PROGRESS IIsT PHYSIOLOGY. 



By Michael Fostee, 



Secretary of the Royal Society. 



We who have come from the little island on the other side of the 

 great waters to take part in this important gathering of the British 

 Association have of late been much exercised in retrospection. We 

 have been looking back on the sixty years' reign of our beloved Sover- 

 eign and dwelling on what has happened during her gracious rule. 

 We have, perhaps, done little in calling to mind the wrongs, the 

 mistakes, and the failures of the Victorian era, but our minds and our 

 mouths have been full of its achievements and its progress; and each 

 of us, of himself or through another, has been busy in bringing back 

 to the present the events of more than half a century of the past. It 

 was Avhile I, with others, was in this retrospective mood that the duty 

 of preparing some few words to say to you to-day seemed suddenly to 

 change from an impalpable cloud in the far distance to a heavy burden 

 pressing directly on the back, and in choosing something to say I have 

 succumbed to the dominant influence. Before putting pen to paper, 

 however, I recovered sufficiently to resist the temptation to add one 

 more to the many reviews which have appeared of the progress of 

 physiology during the Victorian era. I also rejected the idea of doing 

 that for which I find precedents in past presidential addresses, namely, 

 of attempting to tell what has been the history of the science to which 

 a section is devoted during the brief interval which has elapsed since 

 the section last met; to try and catch physiology, or any other science, 

 as it rushes through the brief period of some twelve months seemed to 

 me not unlike photographing the flying bullet without adequate appara- 

 tus; the result could only be either a blurred or a delusive image. 

 But I bethought me that this is not the first — we hope it will not be the 

 last — time that the British Association has met in the Western Hemi- 

 sphere; and though the events of the thirteen years which have slipped 

 by since the meeting at Montreal in 1884 might teem to furnish a very 



'Address to the physiological section of the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, Toronto, 1897, by Prof. Michael Foster, M. A., M. D., D. C. L., LL. D., 

 secretary of the Eoyal Society, president of the section. From Report of British 

 Association, 1897. 



437 



