Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th 1887 (IA b30475958).pdf/30

 into several independent portions. There are now distinctly molecular,- mathematical, industrial, and physiological physics. It is the last of these with which we are concerned. The third or industrial branch has been enormously developed of late by the technical colleges at Bristol, Manchester, the City guilds, at Kensington, and elsewhere. The mathematical branch is well cared for by the two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but the physiological section has been hitherto hardly enough recognised by our teaching bodies. Surely an earnest student should be able somewhere to obtain information as to the natural laws on which the stethoscope, the microscope, the ophthalmoscope and the sphygmograph are founded without having to wade through interminable problems on the C. G. S. system of units, or vortex theories of matter, or—chimera of chimeras—the possibility and advantages of four-dimensional space.

It is to the promotion of this particular branch of study by means of experiment that it is this day my duty to exhort the College. An admirable opportunity exists, for in April of the present