75 
On Nutrition, from a Microscopical Point of View. By 
Lionel S. Beale, M.B., F.R.S., Fellow of the Royal 
College of Physicians, Physician to King’s College Hos- 
pital, Professor of Physiology and of General and Morbid 
Anatomy in King’s College, London, Honorary Fellow of 
King’s College, Fellow of the Medical Society of Sweden, 
&c., &c., &c. 
(Read May 8th, 1867.) 
There are many questions of great general interest and im- 
portance which, perhaps, from not falling exactly within the 
range of subjects prescribed for consideration in any one indi- 
vidual society, are scarcely ever discussed or alluded to, but 
which, nevertheless, belong to many departments of science. 
Of these, nutrition seems to he one. Neither the physicist, 
chemist, microscopist, comparative anatomist, botanist, nor 
medical practitioner, can proceed far in his inquiries without 
referring to the process of nutrition, and asking what is the 
exact nature of this operation by which things are enabled to 
grow and multiply. Strange as it may appear, this, like 
some other elementary matters which one would think natu- 
rally formed one of the first steps in the study of natural know- 
ledge, is very imperfectly understood, and observers are not 
by any means agreed as to what nutrition is or is not. I believe 
that this arises in some measure from the circumstance that 
the subject has not yet been fairly studied from a microscopical 
stand-point. 
As the conclusions advanced in my paper have been en- 
tirely deduced from the results of microscopical observations, 
many of which have been already given in detail in memoirs 
published in our ‘ Transactions’ some years since* — as infer- 
ences derived from microscopical observation ought to be at 
least as interesting to observers as mere descriptions of ob- 
servations — and as there is no Physiological Society in Lon- 
don, nor, considering the great number of societies, does it * 
seem desirable that there should be one, I shall venture to ask 
the attention of the Fellows of our Society to an attempt to 
ascertain the nature of the nutritive process, and to define 
exactly what nutrition is. 
The more I work the more strongly I become convinced 
* Trans. Mie. Soc. and Journal, 1861 to 1865. 
VOL. XV. 
y 
