It would have been reward enough to learn the method Nature pursues for its own sake.  If the sovereign Artificer lets us into his own laboratories and workshops, we need not ask more than the privilege of looking on at his work.  We do not know where we now stand in the hierarchy of created intelligences.  We were made a little lower than the angels.  I speak it not irreverently; as the lower animals surpass man in some of their attributes, so it may be that not every angel’s eye can see as broadly and as deeply into the material works of God as man himself, looking at the firmament through an equatorial of fifteen inches’ aperture, and searching into the tissues with a twelfth of an inch objective.

But there are other positive gains of a more practical character.  Thus we are no longer permitted to place the seat of the living actions in the extreme vessels, which are only the carriers from which each part takes what it wants by the divine right of the omnipotent nucleated cell.  The organism has become, in the words already borrowed from Virchow, “a sum of vital unities.”  The strictum and laxum, the increased and diminished action of the vessels, out of which medical theories and methods of treatment have grown up, have yielded to the doctrine of local cell-communities, belonging to this or that vascular district, from which they help themselves, as contractors are wont to do from the national treasury.

I cannot promise to do more than to select a few of the points of contact between our ignorance and our knowledge which present particular interest in the existing state of our physiological acquisitions.  Some of them involve the microscopic discoveries of which I have been speaking, some belong to the domain of chemistry, and some have relations with other departments of physical science.

If we should begin with the digestive function, we should find that the long-agitated question of the nature of the acid of the gastric juice is becoming settled in favor of the lactic.  But the whole solvent agency of the digestive fluid enters into the category of that exceptional mode of action already familiar to us in chemistry as catalysis.  It is therefore doubly difficult of explanation; first, as being, like all reactions, a fact not to be accounted for except by the imaginative appeal to “affinity,” and secondly, as being one of those peculiar reactions provoked by an element which stands outside and looks on without compromising itself.

The doctrine of Mulder, so widely diffused in popular and scientific belief, of the existence of a common base of all albuminous substances, the so-called protein, has not stood the test of rigorous analysis.  The division of food into azotized and non-azotized is no doubt important, but the attempt to show that the first only is plastic or nutritive, while the second is simply calorifacient, or heat-producing, fails entirely in the face of the facts revealed by the study of man in different climates, and of numerous experiments in the feeding of animals.  I must return to this subject in connection with the respiratory function.