278 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Early in 1906 Schaudinn was appointed zoologist to the Institute 

 for Ship and Tropical Diseases at Hamburg, a position that he gladly 

 accepted, because it gave him perfect freedom for his studies and for 

 the first time in his career an income that freed him from financial 

 cares. But within a few months he fell a victim to intestinal abscesses, 

 from which he had suffered for years and which he may have con- 

 tracted through infection during his studies on the protozoa of the 

 human intestine. 



Most of Schaudinn's memoirs were briefly and concisely written, 

 for he disliked to take time from his observations to put it on writ- 

 ing. As Richard Hertwig says of him, 'he was not a man of the 

 writing table.' With his death, accordingly, as in the case of other 

 great men, many of his important results have been lost to science. 

 His descriptions are remarkable for their lucidity, as his experiments 

 for their simplicity. 



He was essentially a phylogenist, an investigator of racial history 

 by the analysis of individual life cycles, and his achievements furnish the 

 best possible evidence of the fruitfulness of phylogenetic study. He 

 never called in to his aid hypothetical units, but each and every step 

 in his conclusions was based directly upon empirical evidence; he was 

 not a theorist, but a demonstrator. Cytology has to thank him for 

 tracing the genesis of the centrosome, of chromosome reduction and 

 conjugation; biology in general for demonstrating the necessity of con- 

 sidering the life cycle as a unit, and for having so greatly extended 

 our knowledge of life cycles; medicine recognizes his lasting influence 

 in the study of malaria, as the discoverer of the disease germs of 

 dysentery and syphilis, and for pointing out the methods to follow in 

 the study of protozoan disorders. 



