DESCRIPTION OF LABORATORIES 3 
industries of Continental Evn'ope ;uul America. From tliat great enterprise, progressing step by 
step on systematic scientific research, this country has drawn nothing except loss ; ) ear after year 
her export ales are being fast displaced by more reliable, adapted for a wider range of climate, and 
supplied in increasing quantity botii to the tropics and the temperate zones, and to our own 
Colonies themselves, in this respect a short while since exclusively home markets. It is a relief to 
note a hopeful sign in a liberal gauge of support given at Birmingham by tlie Brewer's 
Association, in the shape of ^20,000 to the new University for the Midlands. May it mean that 
the leaders of this industry intend to obtain and provide University teaching for those that study 
their art just as for his the medical man obtains. 
Between such technical industry and Medicine the parallelism is not only exact, but 
in the case before us close : to know more about fermentation is to know more about disease, 
because infection is but a form of fermentation : to both the relation of Physiology, animal and 
vegetable, is one of absolute inseparability. Application of the study of fermentation to Surgery 
has given Surgery the greatest advance it ever made. It has given it a power of deed and a place 
in the world's estimation it hardly dreamed of, and for that vast application our honoured guest, 
Lord Lister, stands universally acknowledged the greatest leader of Surgery and one of the most 
far-reaching benefactors to mankind the world has known. But from no one ot the many and 
frequented non-university schools of the metropolis and elsewhere did he and his experiments 
spring ; they sprang from a University school, in academic Glasgow. 
As for Pathology, it may almost be said to be Medicine itself. And upon Medicine a vast 
gift of knowledge is that which Physiology by discovery after discovery has conferred, and yearly 
does confer. The working of the heart, the actions and the paths of the brain, the exchange 
between the air and our blood, the balance of warmth in the body, digestion and the nutrition of 
the organs, the eye and ear as factories of sensation, on these and a thousand other themes she 
fixes the foundations of the healing art. At the largest school of Medicine in London, its late 
venerable physician used to impress on Iiis students, as a maxim, that the best book on medicine 
is Foster s Physiology ; and tlie most distinguislied of all old Liverpool students. Professor 
Kanthack, has, in a recently published address, endorsed the words of the pre-eminent clinician. 
With Physiology collaborate the sister sciences of Zoology and Botany. A direct outcome of the 
joint-triumphs of the three has been that application of their results to the processes of disease 
which constitute modern Pathology. Physiology has, however, of all three, stood closest sponsor to 
Pathology, especially if with Pliysiology be included, as is usual in England, Histology, or the 
study of the structure of the body with the microscope. Physiology may indeed be called the 
mother of Modern Pathology. Rudolf Virchow, our venerable guest to-day, who for five-and- 
forty years so illustriously has occupied the Chair ot Pathology in the University ot Berlin, 
has urged that the title of the study ought to be, not Pathology, but rather Morbid Physiolog) . 
If that is true, it is at least as true that in Professor Vircliow we have with us the father 
of Modern Pathology. Pathology now stands an intermediary between the more general, 
and also the more exact (in the mathematical sense) science of Physiology and the applications of 
it to medicine at the bedside. The Pathological Laboratory is the paradise of the ' keen ' student 
