14 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



of the little town in which he resided, on account of his habit of 

 dancing along the street. Instead of walking normally, he 

 progressed with a skipping action, varied every dozen paces or 

 so by a complete rotation. There were constant twitchings of 

 his face and one shoulder and he had become stupid intel- 

 lectually. All of these were inco-ordinate conditions and were 

 traced to eye strain. He had been a great reader, and the 

 trouble immediately ceased on paralysing his accommodation 

 with atropine and so relieving the abnormal distribution of his 

 nervous energy. 



Hitherto I have spoken, in a somewhat general way, of the 

 dependence of the centres upon an integrity of the channels 

 through which knowledge is usually taken in, and upon the 

 quality of the intelligence or capability of knowing, for their 

 education. There is another element, however, which has to 

 be appreciated, and without which absolute morphological or 

 anatomical perfection is unavailing. I refer to the chemical 

 side of the question, which is of the greatest importance in 

 relation to the health of every function in life. 



Life itself consists of an innumerable series of chemical 

 reactions which are constantly taking place ; we may say in 

 broad terms that practically every function of which the organs 

 are capable, depends upon some form of chemical change for its 

 healthy performance. The physiologist or bio-chemist no longer 

 contents himself by making observations regarding the micro- 

 scopic characters of cells and their nuclei — he regards structure 

 only in relationship to function, the chemistry of the cell 

 contents, and of the fluids which surround the cells, being 

 matters which largely concern him. The work which has 

 already been accomplished in this direction has shown that the 

 chemical reactions in the cell are very numerous, and so constant 

 withal that bio-chemistry is practically being brought within 

 the realms of the exact sciences. I have no intention of 

 entering into any of these cytological problems — indeed my 



