446 RECENT PROGRESS IN PHYSIOLOGY. 



which we have now learned to speak of as "internal secretion." This 

 knowledge did not begin in this period. The first note was sounded long 

 ago in the middle of the century, when Claude Bernard made known 

 what he called "the glycogenic function of the liver." Men, too, were 

 busy with the thyroid body and the suprarenal capsules long before the 

 meeting of the British Association at Montreal. But it was since then, 

 namely, in 1889, that Minkowski published his discoverj'^ of the diabetic 

 phenomena resulting from the total removal of the pancreas. That, I 

 venture to think, was of momentous value, not only as a valuable dis- 

 covery in itself, but especially, perhaps, in confirming and fixing our 

 ideas as to internal secretion, and in encouraging further research. 



Minkowski's investigation possessed this notable feature, that it was 

 clear, sharp, and decided, and, moreover, the chief factor, namely, sugar, 

 was subject to quantitative methods. The results of removing the 

 thyroid body had been to a large extent general, often vague, and in 

 some cases uncertain; so much so as to justify, to a certain extent, the 

 doubts held by some as to the validity of the conclusion that the symp- 

 toms witnessed were really and simply due to the absence of the organ 

 removed. The observer who removes the pancreas has to deal with a 

 tangible and measurable result, the appearance of sugar in the urine. 

 About this there can be no mistake, no uncertainty. And the confi- 

 dence thus engendered in the conclusion that the pancreas, besides 

 secreting the pancreatic juice, effects some notable change in the blood 

 passing through it, spread to the analogous conclusions concerning the 

 thyroid and the suprarenal, and moreover suggested further experimen- 

 tal inquiry. By those inquiries all previous doubts have been removed ; 

 it is not now a question whether or no the thyroid carries on a so-called 

 internal secretion; the problem is reduced to finding out what it 

 exactly does and how exactly it does it. Moreover, no one can at the 

 present day suppose that this feature of internal secretion is confined 

 to the thyroid, the suprarenal, and the pancreas; it needs no spirit of 

 prophecy to foretell that the coming years will add to physiological 

 science a large and long chapter, the first marked distinctive verses of 

 which belong to the dozen years which have just passed away. 



The above three lines of advance are of themselves enough to justify 

 a certain pride on the part of the physiologist as to the share which his 

 science is taking in the forward movements of the time. And yet I 

 venture to think that each and all of these is wholly overshadowed by 

 researches of another kind, through which knowledge has made, dur- 

 ing the past dozen years or so, a bound so momentous and so far- 

 reaching that all other results gathered in during the time seem to 

 shrink into relative insignificance. 



It was a little before my period, in the year 1879, that Golgi published 

 his modest note, " 13 n nuovo processo di technica microscopica." ^ That 

 was the breaking out from the rocks of a little stream which has since 



' Rendiconti del reale Istitulo Lombardo, Vol. XII, page 206, 



