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On Methods for the Continuous (Photographic) and the Quasi- 
Continuous Registration of the Diurnal Curve of the 
Temperature of the Animal Body. 
By ARTHUR GAMGEE, M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.S., Hon. LL.D. Edin. ; Emeritus 
Professor of Physiology in the Owens College, University of 
Manchester. 
(Received June 15,—Read June 18, 1908.) 
(Abstract.) 
In this paper, the author, after referring at some length to the earlier 
stages of the investigations of the temperature of man, and pointing out 
that the first approximate attempt to study the diurnal curve of the 
temperature of man commenced with the investigations of Jiirgensen, of 
Kiel, whilst the systematic study of temperature in disease dates from the 
time of the researches and publications of Wunderlich, discusses the methods 
which he has adopted: (a) for the absolutely continuous and (0) for the 
quasi-continuous, registration of the diurnal curve of the temperature of 
man. 
After referring to the method employed by Benedict and Snell for the 
quasi-continuous record of the curve of temperature, and which, as he points 
out, is in no sense an automatic method and involves, in a very serious 
manner, the errors due to the “constantly varying personal equation” of the 
observer, he declares himself a strong partisan of a thermo-electric method 
of recording exceedingly minute variations of temperature. Since the time 
when, early in life, he studied the question, the experimental conditions have 
changed in certain very important particulars :— 
1. By the discovery of galvanometers of the moving-coil type which we 
associate with the name of D’Arsonval, but which had their prototype in the 
syphon-recorder of Lord Kelvin, and which are practically uninfluenced by 
changes in the surrounding magnetic field. 
2. By the remarkable improvements in apparatus for maintaining a practi- 
cally constant temperature in considerable masses of liquids, so that a thermo- 
couple may be maintained during days and weeks at so constant a 
temperature as to admit of the variations being absolutely neglected. 
3. The employment of photographic recorders which admit of the regis- 
tration of the movements of mirrors, as in magnetographs and seismographs 
has, further, facilitated such investigations as the one under discussion. 
Under the headings (1) The Thermostat and its Regulators; (2) The 
