October 2S, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



559 



animal kingdom. The marvelous complete 

 studies of gross and minute human anat- 

 omy, which was of such immense service to 

 pathology and surgery, was in no way an 

 obstacle to the brilliant development of the 

 bi'oad science of zoology. 



There is, however, one difference be- 

 tween the stiidies of the energies of inani- 

 mate phenomena and the studies of the 

 vital energies to which I would like to call 

 special attention. For physics there is 

 only one kind of energies ; they are all nor- 

 mal. If the physicist meets with condi- 

 tions which apparently do not agree with 

 some established laAv, he does not transfer 

 these conditions to a pathologist in physics 

 for further investigation. On the contrary, 

 he is only too glad to have such an oppor- 

 tunity; it usually leads to an elucidation 

 of the old law, or still better, an entirely 

 new law might be discovered. When 

 Kirchhoff was surprised by the apparently 

 contradictory fact that by the addition of 

 the yellow light of sodium to the sunlight 

 the dark D-lines in the spectriim instead of 

 becoming lighter became still darker, he 

 did not turn away from the problem. On 

 the contrary, he was glad of this oppor- 

 tunity ; in fact, as he stated once, he. was 

 longing to meet such a complete contradic- 

 tion. The result was the establishment of 

 the law of the propoi-tion between emission 

 and absorption of light and the creation of 

 the nearly new science of spectral analysis. 

 Or to quote a more recent instance, the ex- 

 ceptions to van't Hoff's law of osmosis 

 which were met with in salt solutions and 

 which had been displayed by some as a 

 proof against the validity of that law, 

 served Arrhenius as a basis for the estab- 

 lishment of the far-reaching law of electro- 

 lytic dis.soeiation. It is totally different, 

 however, with physiology. Its domain is, 

 as we saw above, the study of the functional 

 side of living phenomena. Here, however, 

 we find the artificial and unsound distinc- 



tion between normal and abnormal func- 

 tional phenomena. Physiology set up some 

 laws; and if conditions appear which dp 

 not fit in with these laws, . physiology de- 

 clines to deal with them, it refers you to 

 medicine. Are the laws governing the vital 

 functions under pathological conditions 

 actually different from those controlling 

 the functions in health? Certainly not. 

 The laws which physiology establishes must 

 be capable of covering the functional phe- 

 nomena in all conditions of life. The ap- 

 parent exceptions in disease should serve 

 in physiology, as in physics, to unravel the 

 real nature of the laws governing the func- 

 tions of living phenomena, whether they 

 occur in health or in sickness. For in- 

 stance, the processes occurring while the 

 body is in a state of fever should give a 

 clue to the understanding of the mechanism 

 of the constancy of the elevated tempera- 

 ture of warm-blooded animals. Or the 

 conditions prevailing when urine contains 

 albumin should be seized as a means of 

 studying the remarkable phenomenon in 

 the normal urinary secretion, namely, that 

 of all the endothelial cells of the body the 

 kidney endothelia alone do not permit 

 normally the passage of albumin. Or the 

 conditions of the blood and the lung tissues 

 in pneumonia could serve as an aid in 

 studying the factors concerned in the for- 

 nuition of fibrin. And so on and so on in 

 many thousand instances of daily occur- 

 rence. Some very important discoveries in 

 physiology were thus recently brought to 

 light through medical experience and by 

 medical men, with hardly any aid from 

 physiology. The anatomy of the cases of 

 myxoedema and cretinism and the results 

 of the complete removal of the thyroid 

 gland for goitre revealed the physiological 

 importance of that ductless gland for which 

 physiologists, with one single exception-, 

 had no interest. This discovery helped at 

 the same time to establish and to introduce 



