or founder’s work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit of the protagonist of the movement.  I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar.  All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned, thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.

In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn from them.  As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out.  And the correlative to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until adequate proof is forthcoming.

XI

METHODS OF WORK

Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by others which he wished to employ in his lectures.  This was true not only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested him.  He repeated the series of Pasteur’s experiments for himself before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of spontaneous generation.  A curious by-result of these investigations was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great trouble in the Navy—­namely, that the ship’s biscuit, though carefully prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were opened, to be full of maggots.

His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in very fine anatomical drawings.  Indeed, his power of clear and rapid draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing a conception.  Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from one form to the next.

Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms.  Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast number of drawings and notes