362 RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE. 



outcome, more or less direct, of so-called physical events. I venture to 

 say that he who realizes how strong a grip the physiologist and the 

 physician, working hand in hand, are laying on the secret workings of 

 the nervous system, who realizes how, step by step, the two are seeing 

 their way to understand the chain of events issuing in that sheaf of 

 nervous impulses which is the instrument of what we call a voluntary 

 act, must have hopes that that knowledge will ere long give man 

 power over the issue of those impulses, to an extent of which we have 

 at present no idea. Not the mere mending of a broken brain, but the 

 education, development, and guidance of cerebral powers, by the light 

 of a knowledge of cerebral processes, is the office in the — we hope — not 

 far future of the physiology of the times to come. 



I might bring before you other illustrations of the theme which I 

 have in hand. I could, I think, show you that the very greatest of all 

 recent advances in our art, that based on our knowledge of the ways 

 and works of minute organisms, has come about because several inde- 

 pendent gains of science met, in the fullness of time, and linked them- 

 selves together. But my time is spent. 



I should be very loth, however, and you, I am sure, would not wish 

 that I should end this first Huxley lecture without some word as to 

 what the great man whose name the lectures bear had to do with the 

 progress on some points of which I have touched. He had an influence, 

 I think a very great one, upon that progress, though his influence, as is 

 natural, bore most on the progress in this country. 



The condition and prospects of physiology in Great Britain at the 

 present moment are, I venture to think, save and except the needless 

 bonds which the legislature has placed upon it, better and brighter 

 than they ever have been before. At one time, perhaps, it might have 

 been said that physiology was for the most part being made in Ger- 

 many; for, in spite of the fact that some of the greatest and most preg- 

 nant ideas in physiology have sprung from the English brain, it must 

 be confessed that in the more ordinary researches the output in Eng- 

 land has at times not been commensurate with her activities of other 

 kinds. But that cannot be said now. The English physiological work 

 of to-day is, both in quantity and quality, at least equal to that of other 

 nations, having respect to English resources and opportunities. Part 

 of this is probably due to that activity which is the natural response 

 to the stimulus of obstacles. The whip of the antivivisectionists has 

 defeated its own end. But it is also in part due to the influence of 

 Huxley. 



That influence was twofold, direct and indirect. I need not remind 

 you that not only when he sat on the benches of Charing Gross Hos- 

 pital, but all his lifelong afterwards, Huxley was at heart a physiologist. 

 Physiology, the beauty of which Wharton Jones made known to him, 

 was his first love. That morphology, which circumstances led him to 

 espouse, was but a second love: and though his affection for it grew 



