ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 
652 
as a mental discipline, and particularly as a means of deve¬ 
loping at an early period of life that certainty, that convinced¬ 
ness of mind, that clear realisation of facts seen not by the 
bodily, but by the intellectual eye, which constitutes .the 
scientific spirit. A hoy who has once learnt to feel the cer¬ 
tainty of the laws of molecular action, so long as he retains 
his mental soundness, cannot relapse into that state of vague 
indifference about facts which characterise tnanv uneducated 
persons, or lose the habit of exactitude of conception and 
statement to which he is compelled by practice in chemical 
reasoning. It is clear that physiology could not be 
recommended on the same ground, yet I believe that 
they may be wisely included in ordinary instruction, 
not as a discipline or mental drill, but simply on the 
ground that it is so usefully applicable to the common 
affairs of life. It is, undoubtedly, well that every one 
should know something of the structure and functions of 
his own body, and this for several reasons: first, because 
he is enabled thereby to take better care of himself, and 
to understand how to preserve himself by reasonable 
precautions against some of the well-recognised causes 
of disease. Another reason is, that he is not‘ so likely, 
as he would otherwise, to become the dupe of the many 
quackeries which are afloat. He would be more ready to 
take the advice of his doctor as regards the regulation of his 
mode of life, less credulous as to the efficacy of drugs. Let 
us now, in conclusion, state a little more precisely what 
influence the general adoption of a system based on scientific 
training would exercise on the progress of the science in 
which we are interested. I can illustrate this by taking the 
medical student as an example. We teachers of physiology 
to medical students know that, when we begin first to talk 
to them about the principles of the subject— e.g. about chemi¬ 
cal change as the essential condition of vital phenomena; 
about the sources of animal heat and the relation between 
the production of heat and of external motion or any similar 
subject—the great difficulty is, that our auditors are utterly 
at fault for want of those fundamental conceptions about 
matter and its powers, which are expressed in the commonest 
words, such, for example, as solid and liquid, gas and vapour, 
weight, density, volume, &c., all of which to the average 
finished schoolboy are perfectly meaningless. The result is 
that these fundamental conceptions, not having been mastered 
at first, are not mastered at all, and the student begins to 
build the superstructure without having had the opportunity 
of laying the foundation; and thus the whole of the scientific 
