RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 347 



to-day of Midler's volumes cannot but be struck with the smallness of 

 the space (if we omit all that deals with the senses) which he allots 

 to the nervous system when we compare it with what is demanded in 

 the present day; and no little part of even that limited space is taken 

 up with a consideration of the laws of those "sympathies" which gave 

 to the sympathetic nerves their name, but which have long since 

 dropped out of sight. 



Lastly, it must be remembered that many of the speculations of the 

 preceding part of the century had remained barren, and many investi- 

 gations had gone astray through lack of knowledge of the minuter 

 changes which lie at the bottom of physiological events. Those minuter 

 changes could not but lay hidden so long as there was no adequate 

 knowledge of minute structure. I have already referred to the improve- 

 ments of the microscope taking place in the thirties, and this soon bore 

 fruit in the rapid growth of that branch of biologic science once called 

 general anatomy, later on microscopic anatomy, and now best known 

 by the name of histology. It is well-nigh impossible to exaggerate the 

 importance of a histological basis for physiological deductions; it is 

 one of the chief means through which progress has been made and 

 must continue to be made. In the earlier days of physiology the 

 grosser features of structure forming the subject-matter of ordinary 

 anatomy guided the observer to the solution of problems about func- 

 tions ; but after a while these became exhausted, having yielded up all 

 they had to yield, and in due time their place was taken by the finer 

 features disclosed by the microscope. These show as yet no signs of 

 exhaustion, and we may look forward in confidence to their standing 

 us in good stead for years to come. We may expect them to last until 

 we pass, insensibly, from that molecular structure which makes itself 

 known by optical changes to that finer molecular structure which is 

 only revealed by and inferred from its effects, which is an outcome of 

 the ultimate properties of matter, and which is the condition, and so 

 the cause, of all the phenomena of life. 



The early forties of the present century may be taken as marking 

 the rapid rise of histological inquiry. It is true that, even before this, 

 the labors of Henle had gone far; that in this country the brilliant 

 Bowman had already (in 1840) given to the world his classic work on 

 the structure of striated muscle, and a little later (1842) his hardly less 

 important work on the structure of the kidney; that the sagacious 

 Sharpey had embodied, in Quain's Anatomy, a whole host of impor- 

 tant histological observations, and that many others were at work. 

 Nevertheless, one hasxmly to remember how closely the progress of his- 

 tology is bound up with the name of Kolliker, and to call to mind that 

 Kolliker's first paper was not published until 1841, to see clearly how 

 much of our present knowledge of histology and all that that brings 

 with it, has been gathered in since Wharton Jones taught it to the 

 young Huxley. 



