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THE HARVEIAN ORATION, 1903

take place within the bioplasm of the tissues? The practical importance of this must be obvious and should prevent the relegation of such questions as I have been discussing as transcendental and of no useful purpose.

One of the greatest and most far-reaching advances in Pathology within recent years is undoubtedly the recognition of the part played by micro-organisms in the causation of disease. But the full value of the knowledge gained is not comprised in the detection and cultivation of the specific bacillus or yet even in the discovery of the particular toxin which the microbe produces, important as such information is. We require to know how and why these poisons affect the tissues as they do; and in order to arrive at that the rational formulae of these poisons must be known, and what is more the molecular structure of the living cells upon which the noxious material acts, ere we can realize how by some untoward substitution in the atomic arrangement of the living molecule its activities are prejudicially affected.

Our treatment of disease by drugs has been forcibly if irrevently described as “ pouring substances of which we know little into bodies of which we know less.” Pharmacology has done a little towards removing this reproach and that department of it which deals with the

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