INAUGUKAL ADDBESS 



ON 



THE KELATION BETWEEN STEUCTUKE and 

 FUNCTION, as EXAMINED in the AEM. 



By Prof. C. S. Sherrington, M.A., M.D., F.R.S., President. 

 [Read November 11th, 1898]. 



In choosing the above for the title of the Address which, 

 as President for the year, I have the privilege to lay 

 before our Society, the term structure has had reference 

 in my mind not to physical or chemical structure so much 

 as to morphological. Morphology has as its object the 

 study of the form of living things, and comparative 

 anatomy it pursues as one of its best and most valuable 

 methods. Of biological studies, those in comparative 

 anatomy are amongst the oldest. The old masters, in 

 pursuing them, delighted to indulge in speculations con- 

 cerning the use of the structures they described. As the 

 various parts of the mechanisms whose form they 

 examined became known to them, they often had cause to 

 note the suitability of the instrument to its purpose in the 

 life of the creature. They frequently digressed from the 

 immediate object of their treatises to discourse upon the 

 evidences of design in creation of which their observa- 

 tions gave them proof. The Bridgewater Treatises were 

 founded in part to illustrate the beneficent design testified 

 to by the mechanism and vital endowments of the animal 

 body. One of the most famous of these well-known essays 

 was, and has remained, Sir Charles Bell's treatise "On the 

 Hand," Its stately language and wealth of illustration 



