The commonwealth of cells

by H. G. F. Spurrell

CONCLUSION.

While the physiologist is quietly working, making slow but sure progress, his critics, friendly and otherwise, buzz about him like bees. There are some who are in a chronic state of excitement, expecting a revolutionizing discovery from hour to hour; there are others who assure him that he has reached the limit of human powers of comprehension, and can never know much more than he does to-day; and, lastly, there are those who declare that he has done next to nothing, and that his utmost endeavours have failed to effect any real result, and leave all the important secrets of life untouched.

No one knows better than the physiologist how mistaken is the oversanguine class first mentioned. In no department of science, certainly not in physiology, is it possible to reach the top of the ladder by a bound; each rung must be mastered in order. In invading the unknown land the scientist must thoroughly explore and effectively occupy as he advances. He must annex as he goes along; the flying columns which try to reach the enemy’s capital by a dash are never heard of again. In physiology the publication of the various steps is sometimes withheld until the objective has been reached, but our knowledge of life is like Solomon’s temple: a David collects the material, and his successor raises the edifice. The world watches it grow. It is not like those bewildering and unstable palaces of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ built by genii in a single night, and often vanishing as mysteriously.

In every age there have existed people who declare that men can never know more than they do at the moment. There were plenty of them when the science of physiology was unborn, and there will be plenty more of them a hundred years hence; only then they will refer with tolerant amusement to the crude and elementary ideas of their predecessors at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The third class, who take such delight in minimizing the achievements of the physiologist, usually are found, if anyone takes them seriously, to know very little either about the science of physiology itself or the history of its growth. I leave the reader to form his own verdict upon the value of the results obtained from their exceedingly brief and sketchy description in this little volume, with the remark that the science is barely more than three-quarters of a century old, and the most important additions to our knowledge have been made within the last twenty years.

There were, paradoxical as it may sound, great physiologists before then; the work of Harvey, who three centuries ago discovered the circulation of the blood, is above all praise; but how nebulous must have been their ideas may be seen from the following facts: It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the atomic theory of matter was formulated; it was not until twenty years later that the world was startled by a daring chemist who showed that organic compounds obeyed the same natural laws as inorganic; and not until ten years later was the cellular structure of animals, the groundwork in all study of life, recognised.

Even when the science was set upon firm foundations, progress was at first necessarily slow: the organic chemist took some time in examining and classifying the compounds met with in the body—he has not finished yet; and even when the cell theory was grasped, it required much ingenuity and long patience to devise ways of examining organs under the microscope, so that their structure could be made out. The microscope itself was a poor toy fifty years ago, magnifying a diameter ten times where now it magnifies a hundred, and giving only a dim and distorted image. The perfecting of the microscope, and the introduction of anæsthetics and antiseptics, have led to enormous strides being made within the last two decades.

The result of the advance in chemical knowledge, and the introduction of fresh aids to investigation, led to the discarding of vital force as a working hypothesis. Vital force was the bane of the earlier biologists. They made it accountable for all they could not understand, and with this restatement of their difficulties—a restatement which they called an explanation—refrained from further research. But when it was found that many of these inexplicable phenomena, though refractory, yielded to careful study, and could be explained by chemical and physical laws, the physiologist ceased to say of them, ‘They are problems connected with Life, and therefore explained by Vital Force, which is past man’s understanding,’ and frankly admitted that there were many things which he did not as yet fathom. Recently a vitalistic school has cropped up again, declaring that all that it cannot understand must infallibly be due to some occult agency. It shows remarkable vitality in surviving the shocks of successive discoveries.

Turning once more to the present day, we will conclude with a brief glance round a physiological laboratory, and see by what methods the physiologist is preparing future surprises. The chemical department first claims our attention. The imports and exports of animals are carefully balanced, and the changes produced in the food examined. The animal is enclosed in an airtight chamber, air of known composition being pumped into it, and the air which escapes analyzed. The animal most used for this experiment is man himself, since he will take rest and exercise to order, the latter usually on the treadmill, by which it can be also measured, and can be relied upon not to while away the tedium of his imprisonment by gnawing holes in the walls or upsetting his food.