Domain of Physiology. 237 



Dr. Thomas Brown of Edinburgh*, who speaks of " physio- 

 logy corporeal or mental "f. 



§ 9. There is an example of a special application of the 

 words physiology and physic which requires further conside- 

 ration. We have already cited Cotgrave's first definition of 

 the word Physiologie, to which he adds, as a secondary mean- 

 ing, " anatomizing physic, or that part of physic which treats 

 of the composition or structure of man's frame." In more 

 recent times, however, the term has come to mean, not the 

 anatomy, composition, or structure of the human frame, but 

 its functions, to which signification physiology is, in popular 

 language, limited, though now by didactic writers extended to 

 include the functions of the lower animals, of plants, and even 

 of the human mind. 



The word physic, as we have seen, was used by Gower in 

 the general sense of a knowledge of all material things ; but 

 his contemporary, Chaucer, employed it, in a special and 

 restricted sense, to designate the science of medicine. Thus, 

 he calls his practitioner of the medical art "a doctor of physic," 

 and in his description of this personage adds that " gold in 

 physic is a cordial" J. Subsequently, and to our own time, 

 we find the term applied, in Chaucer's sense, alike to the art 



* The grounds upon which Brown based this extension of the term 

 physiology may be gathered from the following passages : — " There is, in 

 short, a science which may be called mental physiology, as there is a science 

 relating to the structure and offices of our corporeal frame to which the 

 term physiology is more commonly applied." He further speaks of the 

 "physiology of the mind, considered as a substance capable of the various 

 modifications or states which, as they succeed each other, constitute the 

 phenomena of thought and feeling f and declares that " the mind is as an 

 object of study to be comprehended, with every other existing sub- 

 stance, in a system of general physics." (Brown, 'The Philosophy of the 

 Human Mind,' Lectures I., II., and V.) 



t Since the writing of this essay, Prof. Osborne Reynolds, in ' Nature ' 

 for June 9, 1881 (vol. xxiv. page 123), has made'a happy use of the word 

 in question, in writing of the locomotive engine of George Stephenson, 

 of which he says, u the physiology of the machine resembled that of the 

 human system ; " while he speaks of its inventor as " he who produced 

 the locomotive physiologically perfect." 



X " With us there was a doctour of phisik, 

 In all the world ne was there non him lyk 

 To speke of phisik and of surgerye, 

 For he was grounded in astronomye. 



He knew the cause of every nialadye, 

 Were it of hot or cold or moyste or drye, 

 And where engendered r.nd of what humoure 

 He was a very parfight practisour. 



Well knew he the old Esculapius, 

 And Dioscorides, and eke Rufus, 



