ADDRESS

BY

J. S. BURDON SANDERSON,

M.A., M.D., LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., Professor of Physiology in the University of Oxford,

PRESIDENT.

We are assembled this evening as representatives of the sciences-men and women who seek to advance knowledge by scientific methods. The common ground on which we stand is that of belief in the paramount value of the end for which we are striving, of its inherent power to make men wiser, happier, and better; and our common purpose is to strengthen and encourage one another in our efforts for its attainment. We have come to learn what progress has been made in departments of knowledge which lie outside of our own special scientific interests and occupations, to widen our views, and to correct whatever misconceptions may have. arisen from the necessity which limits each of us to his own field of study; and, above all, we are here for the purpose of bringing our divided energies into effectual and combined action.

Probably few of the members of the Association are fully aware of the influence which it has exercised during the last half-century and more in furthering the scientific development of this country. Wide as is the range of its activity, there has been no great question in the field of scientific inquiry which it has failed to discuss; no important line of investigation which it has not promoted; no great discovery which it has not welcomed. After more than sixty years of existence it still finds itself in the energy of middle life, looking back with satisfaction to what it has accomplished in its youth, and forward to an even more efficient future. One of the first of the national associations which exist in different countries for the advancement of science, its influence has been more felt than that of its successors because it is more wanted. The wealthiest

country in the world, which has profited more-vastly more-by science than any other, England stands alone in the discredit of refusing the necessary expenditure for its development, and cares not that other nations should reap the harvest for which her own sons have laboured.

It is surely our duty not to rest satisfied with the reflection that England in the past has accomplished so much, but rather to unite and agitate in the confidence of eventual success. It is not the fault of governments, but of the nation, that the claims of science are not recognised. We have against us an overwhelming majority of the community, not merely of the ignorant, but of those who regard themselves as educated, who value science only in so far as it can be turned into money; for we are still in great measure-in greater measure than any other-a nation of shopkeepers. Let us who are of the minority-the remnant who believe that truth is in itself of supreme value, and the knowledge of it of supreme utility-do all that we can to bring public opinion to our side, so that the century which has given Young, Faraday, Lyell, Darwin, Maxwell, and Thomson to England, may before it closes see us prepared to take our part with other countries in combined action for the full development of natural knowledge.

Last year the necessity of an imperial observatory for physical science was, as no doubt many are aware, the subject of a discussion in Section A, which derived its interest from the number of leading physicists who took part in it, and especially from the presence and active participation of the distinguished man who is at the head of the National Physical Laboratory at Berlin. The equally pressing necessity for a central institution for chemistry, on a scale commensurate with the practical importance of that science, has been insisted upon in this Association and elsewhere by distinguished chemists. As regards biology I shall have a word to say in the same direction this evening. Of these three requirements it may be that the first is the most pressing. If so, let us all, whatever branch of science we represent, unite our efforts to realise it, in the assurance that if once the claim of science to liberal public support is admitted, the rest will follow.

In selecting a subject on which to address you this evening I have followed the example of my predecessors in limiting myself to matters more or less connected with my own scientific occupations, believing that in discussing what most interests myself I should have the best chance of interesting you. The circumstance that at the last meeting of the British Association in this town, Section D assumed for the first time the title which it has since held, that of the Section of Biology, suggested to me that I might take the word 'biology' as my starting-point, giving you some account of its origin and first use, and of the relations which subsist between biology and other branches of natural science.

The word 'biology,' which is now so familiar as comprising the sum of the knowledge which has as yet been acquired concerning living nature, was unknown until after the beginning of the present century. The term was first employed by Treviranus, who proposed to himself as a life-task the development of a new science, the aim of which should be to study the forms and phenomena of life, its origin and the conditions and laws of its existence, and embodied what was known on these subjects in a book of seven volumes, which he entitled 'Biology, or the Philosophy of Living Nature.' For its construction the material was very scanty, and was chiefly derived from the anatomists and physiologists. For botanists were entirely occupied in completing the work which Linnæus had begun, and the scope of zoology was in like manner limited to the description and classification of animals. It was a new thing to regard the study of living nature as a science by itself, worthy to occupy a place by the side of natural philosophy, and it was therefore necessary to vindicate its claim to such a position. Treviranus declined to found this claim on its useful applications to the arts of agriculture and medicine, considering that to regard any subject of study in relation to our bodily wants-in other words to utility-was to narrow it, but dwelt rather on its value as a discipline and on its surpassing interest. He commends biology to his readers as a study which, above all others, 'nourishes and maintains the taste for simplicity and nobleness; which affords to the intellect ever new material for reflection, and to the imagination an inexhaustible source of attractive images.'

Being himself a mathematician as well as a naturalist, he approaches the subject both from the side of natural philosophy and from that of natural history, and desires to found the new science on the fundamental distinction between living and non-living material. In discussing this distinction, he takes as his point of departure the constancy with which the activities which manifest themselves in the universe are balanced, emphasising the impossibility of excluding from that balance the vital activities of plants and animals. The difference between vital and physical processes he accordingly finds, not in the nature of the processes themselves, but in their co-ordination; that is, in their adaptedness to a given purpose, and to the peculiar and special relation in which the organism stands to the external world. All of this is expressed in a proposition difficult to translate into English, in which he defines life as consisting in the reaction of the organism to external influences, and contrasts the uniformity of vital reactions with the variety of their exciting causes.1

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Leben besteht in der Gleichförmigkeit der Reaktionen bei ungleichförmigen Einwirkungen der Aussenwelt.'-Treviranus, Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, Göttingen, 1802, vol. i. p. 83.

The purpose which I have in view in taking you back as I have done to the beginning of the century is not merely to commemorate the work done by the wonderfully acute writer to whom we owe the first scientific conception of the science of life as a whole, but to show that this conception, as expressed in the definition I have given you as its foundation, can still be accepted as true. It suggests the idea of organism as that to which all other biological ideas must relate. It also suggests, although perhaps it does not express it, that action is not an attribute of the organism but of its essence-that if, on the one hand, protoplasm is the basis of life, life is the basis of protoplasm. Their relations to each other are reciprocal. We think of the visible structure only in connection with the invisible process. The definition is also of value as indicating at once the two lines of inquiry into which the science has divided by the natural evolution of knowledge. These two lines may be easily educed from the general principle from which Treviranus started, according to which it is the fundamental characteristic of the organism that all that goes on in it is to the advantage of the whole. I need scarcely say that this fundamental conception of organism has at all times presented itself to the minds of those who have sought to understand the distinction between living and non-living. Without going back to the true father and founder of biology, Aristotle, we may recall with interest the language employed in relation to it by the physiologists of three hundred years ago. It was at that time expressed by the term consensus partium-which was defined as the concurrence of parts in action, of such a nature that each does quod suum est, all combining to bring about one effect 'as if they had been in secret council,' but at the same time constanti quadam naturæ lege.1 Professor Huxley has made familiar to us how a century later Descartes imagined to himself a mechanism to carry out this consensus, based on such scanty knowledge as was then available of the structure of the nervous system. The discoveries of the early part of the present century relating to reflex action and the functions of sensory and motor nerves, served to realise in a wonderful way his anticipations as to the channels of influence, afferent and efferent, by which the consensus is maintained; and in recent times (as we hope to learn from Professor Horsley's lecture on the physiology of the nervous system) these channels have been investigated with extraordinary minuteness and success.

Whether with the old writers we speak about consensus, with Treviranus about adaptation, or are content to take organism as our point of departure, it means that, regarding a plant or an animal as an organism, we concern ourselves primarily with its activities or, to use the word which best expresses it, its energies. Now the first thing that strikes us in beginning to think about the activities of an organism is that they are naturally Bausner, De Consensu Partium Humani Corporis, Amst., 1556, Præf. ad lectorem, p. 4.

distinguishable into two kinds, according as we consider the action of the whole organism in its relation to the external world or to other organisms, or the action of the parts or organs in their relation to each other. The distinction to which we are thus led between the internal and external relations of plants and animals has of course always existed, but has only lately come into such prominence that it divides biologists more or less completely into two camps-on the one hand those who make it their aim to investigate the actions of the organism and its parts by the accepted methods of physics and chemistry, carrying this investigation as far as the conditions under which each process manifests itself will permit; on the other those who interest themselves rather in considering the place which each organism occupies, and the part which it plays in the economy of nature. It is apparent that the two lines of inquiry, although they equally relate to what the organism does, rather than to what it is, and therefore both have equal right to be included in the one great science of life, or biology, yet lead in directions which are scarcely even parallel. So marked, indeed, is the distinction, that Professor Haeckel some twenty years ago proposed to separate the study of organisms with reference to their place in nature under the designation of œecology,' defining it as comprising 'the relations of the animal to its organic as well as to its inorganic environment, particularly its friendly or hostile relations to those animals or plants with which it comes into direct contact.'1 Whether this term expresses it or not, the distinction is a fundamental one. Whether with the ecologist we regard the organism in relation to the world, or with the physiologist as a wonderful complex of vital energies, the two branches have this in common, that both studies fix their attention, not on stuffed animals, butterflies in cases, or even microscopical sections of the animal or plant body-all of which relate to the framework of life-but on life itself.

The conception of biology which was developed by Treviranus as far as the knowledge of plants and animals which then existed rendered possible, seems to me still to express the scope of the science. I should have liked, had it been within my power, to present to you both aspects of the subject in equal fulness; but I feel that I shall best profit by the present opportunity if I derive my illustrations chiefly from the division of biology to which I am attached—that which concerns the internal relations of the organism, it being my object not to specialise in either direction, but, as Treviranus desired to do, to regard biology as partsurely a very important part-of the great science of nature.

The origin of life, the first transition from non-living to living, is a

These he identifies with 'those complicated mutual relations which Darwin designates as conditions of the struggle for existence.' Along with chorology-the distribution of animals-œcology constitutes what he calls Relations-Physiologie. Haeckel, 'Entwickelungsgang u. Aufgaben der Zoologie,' Jenaische Zeitschr., vol. v. 1869, p. 353.