Croonian lecture : The respiratory process in muscle and the nature of muscular motion

Abstract

Mr. President and Fellows: —We are keenly sensible of the honour done to us in our being called to lecture on this occasion, and in making this acknowledgment we would express our special gratification in being so enabled to pay this act of piety to the memory of William Croone, whom we commemorate to-day. The Croonian Lecture was founded through his generosity in order to encourage the study of muscular motion, but some sixteen years have now passed since that subject was last treated by the Lecturer. During those years many additions have been made to our knowledge of the subject, and great changes have resulted in our views of it. It is a pleasure to us that we have now the opportunity of taking up again the broken thread of the series, and of turning to-day to the chosen subject of Croone’s own enquiries and chief interest. We could wish that a time more free from other occupations and anxieties than the present had allowed us to do this less unworthily. Croone found in muscle the chief immediate hope of studying the energy discharges of living elements, and it was surely an enlightened instinct which led him to foresee, however dimly then, what we must recognise as still true after this lapse of two and a half centuries. We still must look to the study of muscular motion as the most fruitful, and perhaps for some time to come the only, avenue to intimate' knowledge of the modes of energy discharge by the living cell, and of their relation to the specific chemical processes of life. More than this, it is the study of muscle activity which has so far given us all we know of the meaning of respiration as the accompaniment of life. The study of respiratory exchanges in the lungs and in the blood of mammals has given us valuable lessons, and has unfolded attractive stories of animal adaptation to environment. That study takes its place in the natural history of the Vertebrates, and has a living value for the purposes of human medicine. It is describing to us the modes in which oxygen reaches and carbon dioxide leaves the cell under the anatomical conditions of the vertebrate animal, but it does not attack the intimate problems of respiration as a process of animal cell life in general. Croone, of Cambridge, was too close in time and sympathy to the genius of Mayow, and to the work of his other contemporaries at Oxford, not to realise that in the study of muscle lay probably the first path to knowledge of the inner processes of life within the living substance itself.