14 | SCIENCE. 
no one else wanted it, and was very glad to get even 
that. A second and still stronger reason is, that as 
medicine is slowly passing out of the regions of em- 
piricism and rule-of-thumb treatment, or mal-treat- 
ment, it has become evident that sound physiology 
is its foundation; and this university will at no dis- 
tant day have a medical school connected with it. 
As you walk presently through the rooms of the 
new building, and see the abundance of instruments 
of precision for teaching and research —the batteries, 
galvanometers, induction-coils, and spectroscopes; 
the balances, reagents, and other appliances of a 
chemical laboratory; the microscope for every stu- 
dent; the library of biological books and journals; 
the photographic appliances; the workshop for the 
construction and repair of instruments — when you 
see these things, it may interest you to recall that 
sixty years ago there was not a single public physio- 
logical laboratory in the world; nor was there then, 
even in any medical school, a special professor of 
physiology. So late as 1856 Johannes Muller taught 
in Berlin, human anatomy, comparative anatomy, 
pathological anatomy, physiology, and embryology. 
DuBois-Reymond, now himself professor in Ber- 
lin, has graphically described the difficulties of the 
earnest student of physiology, when he attended 
Miiller’s lectures in 1840.1 
‘We were shown (he says) a few freshly prepared micro- 
scopic specimens (the art of putting up permanent preparations 
being still unknown), and the circulation of the blood in the 
frog’s web.” So much for the histological side. 
‘* We were also shown the experiment of filtering frog’s blood 
to get a colorless clot, an experiment on the roots of the spinal 
nerves, some reflex movements in a frog, and that opium-poison- 
ing was not conducted along the nerves. ‘There were some bet- 
ter experiments on the physiology of voice, —a subject on which 
Miller had recently been working; and there was finally a dem- 
onstration of the effect upon respiration of dividing the pneu- 
mogastric nerves.” 
In all, you see six experiments, or sets of experi- 
ments, in the whole course, in addition to the exhibi- 
tion of some microscope slides; and all these mere 
demonstrations. It was hardly thought of, that a 
student should use a microscope, or make an experi- 
ment, himself. If he desired to do so, the difficulties 
in his way were such as but few overcame. 
‘He must experiment in his lodgings, where on account of his 
frogs he usually got into trouble with the landlady, and where 
many researches were impossible — there were no trained assist- 
ants to guide him — no public physiological library — no collec- 
tion of apparatus. We had to roll our own coils, solder our own 
galvanic elements, make even our own rubber tubing, for at that 
time it was not an article of commerce. We sawed, planed and 
drilled — we filed, turned, and polished. If through the kind- 
ness of a teacher a piece of apparatus was lent to us, how we 
made the most of it — how we studied its idiosyncrasies — above 
all, how we kept it clean! ” 
Of course certain men, the men who were born to 
become physiologists, and not mere attendants on 
lectures on physiology, surmounted these difficulties. 
1 Emil DuBois-Reymond. Der physiologische unterricht, 
sonst und jetzt. Berlin, 1878. The quotations from this pam- 
phlet, while giving, I trust, a true idea of the substance of Du- 
Bois-Reymond’s statements, have been curtailed, and are not to 
be regarded as literal full translations of the original. —H. N. M.- 
TE ee ye 
[Vou. III., No. 50. 
One has only to recall the names of DuBois-Reymond 
himself, and of such of his contemporaries as Briicke, 
Helmholtz, Ludwig, Vierordt, Donders, and Claude 
Bernard, to realize that fact; and undoubtedly there 
was a good side to it all. Triflers, at any rate, were 
eliminated; and the class of individuals wasunknown 
who sometimes turn up at modern laboratories (and, 
judging from a good deal of current physiological 
literature, sometimes get admitted to them) with a 
burning desire to undertake forthwith a complicated 
research, though they would hardly know an ordinary 
physiological instrument if shown to them, much less — 
how to handle it. They never can wait: they must 
begin the next morning, believing, I presume, that 
modern laboratories are stocked with automatic appa- 
ratus, — some sort of physiological sausage-machines, 
in which you put an animal at one end, turn the han- 
dle, and get a valuable discovery out at the other. 
With one exception, Berlin was not in 1840 worse 
off than other German universities, so far as facili- 
ties for physiological study were concerned, and cer- 
tainly better off than any university in England or 
the United States. The exception was in Breslau, 
where the celebrated Purkinje, single-handed, had 
founded a physiologicalinstitute. It has usually been 
supposed that in this he followed the example given by 
Liebig, who founded at Giessen the first public chem- 
ical laboratory; but this, pace my colleague Profes- 
sor Remsen, can hardly have been the case. It is 
to Purkinje that the honor belongs of founding the 
first public laboratory. Liebig undoubtedly conceived 
the plan when working in Paris in Gey Lussac’s 
private laboratory, but it was not until 1826 that he 
began to put it into execution; and at that date Pur- 
kinje had already, largely at his own cost, started a 
physiological laboratory at Breslau, open to students, 
—on avery small scale, itis true, but still the germ of 
all those great laboratories of physics, chemistry, and 
biology, which are now found in every civilized coun- 
try, and to which, more than to any thing else, modern 
science owes its rapid progress. Of these there must 
be at least forty now organized for physiological work ; 
and almost every year sees an increase in their num- 
ber. How has this come about in the fifty odd years 
which have passed since the origination of Pur- 
kinje’s ill-equipped and little known workrooms?. 
First and foremost, because of the improvement in 
philosophy which took place as men began to break 
loose from the trammels of Greek and mediaeval meta- 
physics, and to realize that a process is not explained 
by the arbitrary assumption of some hypothetical 
cause invented to account for it. So long as the phe- 
nomena exhibited by living things were regarded, 
not as manifestations of the properties of the kind 
of matter of which they were composed, but as mere 
exhibitions of the activity of an extrinsic independent 
entity, —a pneuma, anima, vital spirit, or vital prin- 
ciple which had temporarily taken up its residence 
in the body of an animal, but had no more essential 
connection with that body than a tenant with the 
house in which he lives, —there was no need for 
physiological laboratories. Dissection of the dead 
body might, indeed, be interesting as making known 
