INTKODUCTOKY ADDKESS: " STKUCTUKE 

 AND FUNCTION." 



By Francis Gotch, M.A., F.E.S., President. 



PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL. 



I have first to express to my fellow-members of the 

 Liverpool Biological Society my sense of the honour which 

 the Society has accorded me in electing me President for 

 the session 1894-95, and my gratification at the emphasis 

 which this places upon those aspects of Biological study 

 and inquiry with which I am especially identified. The 

 growth of science necessitates subdivision into departments 

 and tends in consequence to isolate the departments thus 

 made, so that Physiology, by a natural process of evolu- 

 tion, gradually diverges from those sciences which deal 

 more especially with the structures of living things — 

 Zoology and structural Botany. The problems presented 

 to the physiologist, although fundamentally the same as 

 those offered by Zoology, are in their immediate aspect 

 different in kind ; the methods employed for their elucida- 

 tion are, in many directions, special to physiological 

 workers and thus, even had there been no adventitious 

 circumstances to accentuate the divergence, a partial 

 separation would probably have occurred. 



It is however hardly necessary for me to remind you 

 that adventitious circumstances have existed, and exist 

 still, which have effected, if not a divorce, at least a 

 judicial separation between the wedded studies of Physi- 

 ology and Biology. Pope crystallised, by the elegant 

 terseness of his diction, many a prevalent notion, and 

 amongst such is that expressed in the well known line, 



