900 The American Naturalist. [October, 
dage to the art of medicine. That physiology is, and always must be, 
the basis of the science of healing is so much a truism that I would not 
venture to repeat it here were it not that some of those enemies, alike 
to science and humanity, who are at times called anti-vivisectionists, 
and whose zeal often outruns, not only discretion, but even truth, have 
quite recently asserted that I think otherwise. Should such a hallu- 
cination ever threaten to possess me, I should only have to turn to the 
little we yet know of the physiology of the nervous system and remind 
myself how great a help the results of pure physiological curiosity— 
I repeat the words, pure physiological curiosity, for curiosity is the 
mother of science—have been, alike to the surgeon and the physician, 
in the treatment of those in some way most afflicting maladies, the dis- 
eases of the nervous system. Now physiology is, and always must be, 
the basis of the science of healing; but it is something more. When 
physiology is dealing with those parts of the body which we call mus- 
cular, vascular, glandular tissues and the like, rightly handled she 
points out the way not only to amend that which is hurt, to repair the 
damages of bad usage and disease, but so to train the growing tissues 
and to guide the grown ones as that the best may be made of them for 
the purposes of life. She not only heals, she governs and educates. 
Nor does she do otherwise when she comes to deal with the nervous tis- 
sues. Nay it is the very prerogative of these nervous tissues that their 
life is above that of all the other tissues, contingent on the envi- 
ronment and susceptible of education. If increasing knowledge gives 
us increasing power so to mould a muscular fibre that it shall play to 
the best the part which it has to play in life, the little knowledge we 
at present possess gives us at least as much confidence in a coming far 
greater power over the nerve cell. This is not the place to plunge into 
the deep waters of the relation which the body bears to the mind, but 
this at least stares us in the face, that changes in what we call the body 
bring about changes in what we call the mind. When we alter the 
one, we alter the other. If, as the whole past history of our science 
leads us to expect, in the coming years a clearer and clearer insight 
into the nature and conditions of that molecular dance which is to us 
the material token of nervous action, and a fuller, exacter knowledge 
of the laws which govern the sweep of nervous impulses along fibre and 
cell, give us wider and directer command over the moulding of the 
growing nervous mechanism and the maintenance and regulation of 
the grown one, then assuredly physiology will takes it place as a judge 
of appeal in questions not only of the body, but of the mind; it will 
raise its voice not in the hospital and consulting-room only, but algo in 
the Senate and the school.” 
