220 
THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 
When the teachers or writers on these subjects felt themselves at 
a loss, they were contented with urging the necessity of further 
inquiry, without shewing in what way or by what means it was 
to be prosecuted. Both teachers and pupils were only creeping 
about in the dark, accumulating facts which, from their diversity 
and contradictory aspect, only increased the difficulty of arriving 
at a general law, and strengthened doubts as to the trustworthiness 
of science. Among the most striking and instructive of the fea- 
tures of the present state of science was the fact that it is no 
longer proposed to cultivate the knowledge of the human organiza- 
tion by one or two means of research. Nor does the study of the 
human body alone, nor the aid of the microscope, of chemistry, 
and of embryology, suffice for the requirements of the present 
method of prosecuting the sciences of human life and structure. 
The physiologist is called on to appeal to the general laws of 
matter, whether organic or not. If it be said there is nothing new 
in all these methods, it is true, if it is meant that singly these 
means of knowledge have to some extent been employed ; but it 
would be difficult to point to any age or country where they have 
before been combined into a system and directed to these pur- 
poses. Another important characteristic of modern inquiry was 
the part assigned to the purer intellectual function. Although no 
one could see more clearly than the orator the importance of 
emancipating the mind from the bondage of the senses, and that 
nothing but the strictest questioning of Nature would suffice, yet 
it was a fact that great promoters of science had, almost without 
exception, been industrious observers. Some had, indeed, ap- 
peared at long intervals who had seemed to reach great conclu- 
sions to some extent, independently of the senses. Harvey saw 
not with the bodily organ the junctions of veins and arteries on 
which the doctrine of the circulation is built ; but the means of 
science must be adapted to the course of every-day study, and not 
to exceptional possibilities. It was by the microscope that those 
beautiful revelations of minute anatomy had been made on which 
future physiologists would delight to look back. The anatomy of 
muscular products exhibiting a fibre composed of two substances, 
distinct in their constitution, and enclosed in different cells, de- 
tected in the 18 , 000 th part of an inch, was an achievement of 
which modern times might be proud. The great principle of the 
new school of physiology, which is so subversive of those of the 
former,- was, that vascularity is secondary and subordinate, and 
not essential to organization, and might be dispensed with. It 
would be vain to attempt any definition of vital forces, and the 
same difficulty besets the naturalist' in this respect. We know as 
much of vital forces as we do of those we call physical. The 
