Dietetics and Nutrition are the natural topics to come next, the latter term to include excretion.
The Circulation logically is the next thing in order, because it is the blood and the lymph which distribute all the required materials, and collect all the undesirable materials of the or ganism for prompt removal.
Respiration, although in a sense next to motion the most fundamental of organic func tions, may be considered in one place as well as another, although not, certainly, until part at least of the chemical and the neuro-physical movements of the organism have been learned.
Respiration is at heart a chemical process, a fact which some students are slow to learn, but which is fundamental.
There is no reason known to the writer why Reproduction should always be found at the latter end of a general treatise on physiology, since no apology need be offered for discussion of this base-function. It °goes' at the end, however, as well as anywhere else. In the majority of textbooks, even to-day, it certainly is discussed inadequately, a bare outline being given, and the entire hygienic aspect— the only aspect in which the majority of young men and women really need information — is wholly ignored. In many schools it is not customary to systematically teach this subject at all, ap parently not altogether out of °modesty," but because every medical faculty realizes that this ordinarily is the first chapter of the textbook to become really familiar to the student: it has native and dynamic interest for every normal adolescent.
Laboratory Physiology, as already has been suggested, is an art in itself, a highly technical art, moreover, based on science. Every year it is more practical, applying itself more widely and also in more detail to the needs of practi cal medicine, and of hygiene, making itself in short more and more useful (never was it by any possibility ornamental).
Recent Advance in Looking back a generation, comparing Dalton's text book with the latest edition of Howell or of Bainbridge and Menzies, it is clear that the advance in the science as a whole is dominat ingly metabolic. This indeed was what was lacking 20 years ago to round out the science beyond the organic mechanics which then largely it was. Still considerable progress has
been made in neurology, in nutrition, and in the physiology of the skin.
In choosing a dozen or more augmenting topics for mention as of especial import in the advance of physiology, it is almost impossible to suit the tastes of any observer besides the writer! Still, perhaps these subjects arc really those that have developed most importantly for science in general: The more recondite composition of the blood has been very successfully studied by many. Immunity, sera, anaphylaxis, acidosis, etc., are physiologic topics studied mostly by other branches of medicine, hut each chemical and not part of the ingenious fairy-story of uceptorsP and so on which originated in Germany. The dynamic factors of the blood have been much developed, especially as the new backbone, so to say, of the newest branch of physiology called by some endocrinology, the science and art of the ductless glands. Much has been learned at Harvard about adrenin and pituitrin and their relations to the dynamic "drives° of the organ ism — during anger for example. Vasocon striction, qurcker coagulation, antifatigue effect, and an increase of blood-sugar are somehow topics conspicuous in this new work.
Many plant-pollens give special cases of hay fever because their protein is reacted too vio lently by the this is a type of a new group of blood-reactions whose study properly is on a physiologic base.
Fatigue in its more rational aspects (involv ing the actual living of the actual animal and not the actual dying of some abstracted por tion of an animal) has been studied extensively in part as °war-worlco toward the maximal pro duction of munitions, etc. Columbia has led in this work here in America.
Integration has been appreciated as never before under the influence of psychology. Less and less attention is paid to the phenomena ex hibited by protoplasm in its dying stages dying every isolated organ must be. The prin ciple is capable of very much further applica tion still in both theoretic and practical physi ology. A materialist, for example cannot be pos sibly really wise as a physiologist, however good an anatomist he may develop into.