Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/788

768 are far more competent to discuss them than I am. But the laborers in the field are all too few, and the reasons therefor are not far to seek. One of these undoubtedly is the high scientific attainment necessary to a successful prosecution of this kind of investigation. The physiological student must be a physicist, a chemist, an anatomist, and a physiologist, all at once. Again, the course of instruction of those who might fairly be expected to enter upon this work, the medical students of the country, is directed toward making them practitioners rather than investigators. In the third place, the importance of physiological studies in connection with zoölogical research is only beginning in this country to receive the share of attention it deserves. I well remember the gratification I experienced in 1873 upon receiving a letter from Professor Louis Agassiz, asking me to give some lectures at Penikese upon physiological chemistry—a new departure for those times. In this view of the case it seems very appropriate that a new subsection of this Association should be just now in process of formation. We welcome warmly the body of men who form it, and we predict that from the new subsection of Anatomy and Physiology most valuable contributions will be received for our proceedings.

It is a beautiful conception of science which regards the energy which is manifested on the earth as having its origin in the sun. Pulsating awhile in the ether-molecules which fill the intervening space, this motion reaches our earth and communicates its tremor to the molecules of its matter. Instantly all starts into life. The winds move, the waters rise and fall, the lightnings flash, and the thunders roll, all as subdivisions of this received power. The muscle of the fleeing animal transforms it in escaping from the hunter who seeks to use it for the purpose of his destruction. The wave that runs along that tiny nerve-thread to apprise us of danger transmutes it, and the return pulse that removes us from its presence is a portion of it. The groan of the weary, the shriek of the tortured, the voiced agony of the babeless mother, all borrow their significance from the same source. The magnificence of the work of a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michael Angelo; the divine creations of a Beethoven or of a Mozart; the immortal "Principia" of a Newton, and the "Mécanique Céleste" of a Laplace—all had their existence at some point of time in oscillations of ether in the intersolar space. But all this energy is only a transitory possession. As the sunlight gilds the mountain-top and then glances off again into space, so this energy touches upon and beautifies our earth and then speeds on its way. What other worlds it reaches and vivifies we may never know. Beyond the veil of the seen, Science may not penetrate. But Religion, more hopeful, seeks there for the new heavens and the new earth, wherein shall be solved the problems of a higher life.