directs it, which is constructed to differentiate it from other energies, to give it form and purpose, to afford it a vehicle, is the spinal nerve of the vertebrate and the equivalent organ in other creatures. The psychical energies, including consciousness, intellection, emotion, which are essential characteristics of the vital machine, and which, in the case of those with which we are principally concerned, at least influence to an important degree its power, endurance, and efficiency, all depend for their effective display and fruitful exertion upon the preservation in good health and perfect form of the upper brain. A touch upon the surface of that organ impairs the action of the mind; the destruction of a ganglion takes away the power of expression if not of thought; the lesion or degeneration of its tissue measures a proportional loss of psychic energy. With the organ sound and strong, its action depends, as every day's experience shows us, upon its nutrition and repair. Like the body, it is seen to be a machine which guides and applies energies derived from external sources. All its energies come of an initial supply brought through the blood channels from the digested food, and both body and brain exhibit characteristic modes of guidance and application of the transferred and transformed energies originally stored in air and food. Body and brain are apparatus for absorption, transformation, and employment of characteristic forms of energy. Their methods of absorption, modes of transformation, and processes of application constitute important and attractive as well as legitimate problems in physical research. Tracing back the path by which all matter came in from space to construct the material world and retracing the path over which the energies came out of the ether and its accompanying stock of all the energies, are companion problems. The origin of energies displayed in the vital machine is found in the food consumed, and the apparatus of the body is simply, as is now well proven, employed in the freeing of these energies from their potential form in the chemical affinities of oxygen for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and the elements of various other compounds, and the diversion and direction of the resultant energies of various kinds and always equivalent quantity in the performance of internal and external work. Brain, nerve, muscle, gland, all give proper direction to appropriate energies; none originates energy or has power, intrinsically, of doing work. They are all characteristically and kinematically similar to the organs of the machines constructed by man. But the ultimate physical source of all energies, so far as identified, is the heat and light of the sun; while in turn the source of the energy of the sun's rays is presumed to be the mechanical energy of colliding atoms, molecules, star dust, all celestial bodies, the comets, planets, suns, worlds. The distinctive energies are simply, as we suppose, different modes of motion of atoms and molecules and masses, if physical; but we find no light yet thrown upon the nature of the more subtle energies of vitality, of intellection, of mind, or upon their relation to matter. Conclusions of serious import, of singular interest, of engrossing attractiveness, and of wonderful possible result may be deduced from what has preceded; some of these conclusions are positive and certain, some extremely probable, others bare possibilities, so far as we can now trace them, and the possibilities are of such inconceivable magnitude and importance, should they be found to have a substantial basis, that, great as are the consequences of the positive deductions, the further investigation of the potentialities will undoubtedly be considered by men of science a matter of even superior importance. Some of these conclusions are: (1) The vital machine is not a heat engine, subject to the thermodynamic laws governing all known forms of thermo-dynamic machinery produced by man up to the present time. We can not assert that it is not a heat engine in the sense of being a machine, which by as yet undiscovered methods directly transforms thermal into dynamical and other forms of energy; but it certainly can. not employ expansible fluids and transform energy by their expansion through a wide range of temperature, and it as certainly does greatly exceed all heat engines in efficiency both ideal and actual. (2) The vital machine is an energy transforming apparatus, in which the supplied energy is employed in useful transformations in far higher degree than in any energy transforming machine or system yet produced by man to render available the potential energy of oxidizable substances. (3) The vital machine must operate through methods of energy transformation yet unknown to science, though undoubtedly absolutely scientific and intelligible once discovered. The source of energy is perfectly well known, and the primary steps of the process determined up to the completion of the preparation of the substance containing the potential energy furnished for transfer into the organs of the body and for immediate transformation by chemical action. The resulting products are all probably identified and most of them well understood and quantitatively determinable; but the intermediate processes of transformation of potential into actual energy, and of transformation of one form of energy into another, as yet are veiled from our sight and concealed from our touch. (4) These methods, whatever their character, produce mechanical energy more cheaply, as measured in energy consumed, than any known prime motor; develop heat at minimum cost in the same terms; in some cases produce electrical energy in considerable quantity and at high tension, by some probably direct transformation; occasionally produce light of almost absolute purity and perfection of economical character, and in all intelligent creatures supply the mind with an instrument utilizing physical energies for intellectual demonstrations. (5) All these products being considered, this vital machine is enormously more efficient than any apparatus yet invented by the human mind, and illustrates methods of energy transformation which if they could be applied in industrial operations in place of the heat engines would afford inconceivable amelioration of the condition of the race, and to a less but nevertheless considerable degree of his attendant creatures, both by giving the power of securing the utmost possible duty from our stores of latent available energy, and by prolonging the life of the race by indefinitely removing the period of exhaustion of those stores. (6) The best evidence yet secured by research seems to indicate that the method of energy transformation in the vital machine is one which directly transforms the potential energy of the food, as developed by chemical combinations, into kinetic form, sometimes perhaps simply by chemico-dynamic change, sometimes by chemico-electric transformation; and this in turn, and possibly also the energy due to oxidation of food, and, to some extent, of the muscle itself, into mechanical power, into the vital energy of the automatic system, and into the form of energy producing brain work. (7) The vital machine may produce electricity as one principal output of its working processes, and probably by some direct system, without intervention of either heat energy or dynamical power. (8) The vital machine may produce light energy in substantially unadulterated form, and by some process which does not involve either high temperature or the production of heat or other energies to be rejected as waste. (9) It seems most probable, in view of what has been here collated, that the vital machine is some form of chemico and electro dynamic engine. We know that the vital machine is not thermo-dynamic in the sense of being a heat engine of any known class. We find in electricity the apparently next most available form of energy for use in transformation into dynamic and thermal and other forms, and many accept this as a provisional, a working, hypothesis. This was long ago hinted at by the greatest scientific men, the greatest minds, it would perhaps be fair to say, that have illuminated the history of the race. A century ago Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), a keen "Yankee" with uncontrollable inclinations toward scientific research, showed to his own satisfaction, and to the extent of proving to others its probability, that the animal system constitutes a machine of higher efficiency than any steam engine. Joule, as long ago as 1846, working with Captain Scoresby, concluded that the animal motor "more closely resembles an electro-magnetic engine than a heat engine," and this is reaffirmed by Tait in our own day. Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, in his papers of about 1850, adopts the idea of Joule, and introduces the principle of Carnot, and says explicitly: "When an animal works against a resisting force, there is not a conversion of heat into mechanical effect, Rumford's Essays, 1800. 2 Tait's History of Thermo-dynamics. SM 96-22 but the full thermal equivalent of the chemical forces is never produced; in other words, the animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine, and very probably the chemical forces produce the external mechanical effects through electrical means." We have now seen how all investigations made before and since that date, so far as interpretable, point to the same conclusion:1 that the machine is not a heat engine. The possibilities of improvement by simulating or paralleling nature are seemingly stupendous. Could the chemical energy of fuel oxidation be directly transformed into dynamic energy; could it even be changed by double or by indirect transformation, as through the intermediary of electricity, and in such manner as to insure a full equivalence of utilizable energy, it is evident that we might anticipate a conversion as economical as we now attain in the transformation of mechanical into electrical energy, and, consequently, many times as large a return for outgo as we at present realize and correspondingly lengthened time of exhaustion of our stores of primary energy. At first thought the possibility of an economic gain in power production, by following nature in energy transformations through processes which involve the organi zation of a sugar manufactory as a source of fuel supply, may seem somewhat unpromising; but when it is considered that sugars and glycogens are but carbon and water and that the chemist has successfully attacked many other more unpromising cases, as the synthesis of madder, and of the various other commercial substitutes for natural products, the possibilities, even seen from a financial standpoint, are not apparently absolutely to be ignored. Similarly, could chemical energy be directly and fully transformed into light, where needed, and as effectively as nature performs these operations of energy transformation in the vital apparatus, the enormous expenditure, the fearful wastes, now going on even in our production of out-of-door light by the use of the electric arc would be reduced to a fraction of their present amounts and to an insignificant fraction of total costs. Could vital energy be identified and brought under control, or could that mysterious energy which is its servant in directing and producing animal power be securely gained and its processes understood and controlled, it would seem possible that direct transformations of energywhich probably means by influencing molecular and atomic rather than molar motion-might be made possible to man, and all this impressive and wonderful chain of consequences caused to follow. 1 Mathematical Papers, Vol. I, lviii, page 505. RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE, AND THEIR BEARING ON MEDICINE AND SURGERY.1 By Prof. MICHAEL FOSTER, I. When fifty-four years ago the school of Charing Cross Hospital gathered itself together for its winter work, among the newcomers was a pale-faced, dark-haired, bright-eyed lad, whose ways and works soon told his fellows that he was of no common mold. To-day I am about to attempt the fulfillment of the duty, which the authorities of the school have done me the honor to lay upon me, of delivering the first of the series of lectures which the school has wisely instituted to keep alive, in the minds of those to come, the great services which that lad's strenuous and brilliant life rendered to the healing art. The trust of the Huxley Lectureship provides that the lecturer shall dwell on "recent advances in science, and their bearing on medicine and surgery." I venture to hope that I shall be considered as not really departing from the purpose of the trust if I attempt to make this first lecture a sort of preface to the volume, or rather the volumes, of lectures to come; and since a preface bears a different paging, and is written in a different fashion, from that which it prefaces, I shall be so bold as, with your permission, to make the character of my lecture to-day dif ferent from what I suppose will be that of the lectures of my successors. It will, I imagine, be their duty to single out on each occasion some new important advance in science, and show in detail its bearings on the art of medicine. Each succeeding lecturer will, in turn, be limited in the choice of his subject, and so assisted in his task by the choice of his predecessors. I to-day have no such aid. It seems fitting that, for the purposes of this initial lecture, the word "recent" should be so used as to go back as far as the days of Huxley's studentship. If it be so used, I am brought to face advances in science affecting medicine and surgery so numerous and so momentous that any adequate treat The Huxley Lecture. Delivered at Charing Cross Medical School, London, on October 5, 1896, by Prof. Michael Foster, Sec. R. S. Printed in Nature, Nos. 1407 and 1408, vol. 54, 1896. |