344 EECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 



giving up its treasures, new plants and new beasts, brought home by 

 energetic travelers, were being duly investigated. But this was only 

 a continuation of what had been going on long before. 



Of the great biologic revolution which was about to come, there was 

 not so much as even a sign in the skies when Huxley took his seat on the 

 Charing Cross benches, though Charles Darwin was already brooding 

 over the ideas which had come to him in his long voyage. 



Two great changes, however, were already beginning — one due to 

 new ideas, the other to improved methods. 



The morphological conceptions, of which Von Baer, in his " History 

 of Development," had laid the foundations, destined to make a new 

 science of animal forms, were being carried forward by Johannes Mid- 

 ler in Germany, though, save for the expositions of Carpenter, tbey had 

 made but little way in this country. Nowhere, indeed, had they pro- 

 gressed far. The man who, perhaps to Huxley himself, was to advance 

 them most, Gegenbaur, was as yet a mere student. Nor, in spite of the 

 beginning made by Yon Baer himself, by Allen Thomson, and by 

 Bathke, had embryology made much progress. Kolliker, to whom the 

 science owes so much, had as yet written no line. Still the new ideas 

 were beginning to push. 



Of no less importance was the impulse given by the improvements in 

 the microscope. Only ten years before Sharpey, discovering that emi- 

 nently microscopic mechanism, ciliary action, found that a simple lens 

 was a much more trustworthy tool than the then compound microscope. 

 But in the ten years a great change had taken place, and, during the 

 latter part especially of the decennium, improved instruments yielded 

 a rich harvest of discovery in animal and vegetable life. Prominent 

 among the new additions to truth was increased knowledge of the 

 mammalian ovum, in acquiring which Wharton Jones, Huxley's teacher 

 at Charing Cross, did much. But the most momentous and epoch- 

 making step was the promulgation of the cell theory by Schwann and 

 Schleiden as the decennium drew to its close, and more or less con- 

 nected with that step was the accurate description by Yon Mold of the 

 structure of the vegetable cell, and his introduction of the word, which, 

 next to the word cell, has perhaps had the most profound influence on 

 the progress of biologic science — I mean the word protoplasm. 



Of this wide field of general biologic knowledge the college of sur- 

 geons at that time took no heed, or at least made no formal demand. 

 It is true that part of it found its place in the lectures on anatomy and 

 physiology, and in the consequent examinations, but only a small part. 

 It is also true that the lecturer on materia medica had by custom license 

 to roam over almost the whole of nature, and the student in learning 

 the nature and use of drugs took doses of heterogeneous natural his- 

 tory; the mention, for instance, in the Pharmacopu'ia of castoreuin 

 being made the occasion of a long disquisition on the biology of the 

 beaver. 



