Kinds of Scientists 53 



way. A far more earthy and human type, he had frequently 

 spent his youth watching birds or catching butterflies. 

 He found an immediate and daily pleasure in the flash of 

 red on the blackbird's wing, the beauty of the twihght 

 song of the wood thrush, the metamorphosis of a sUmy 

 caterpillar into a magnificently bejeweled moth. Frequently 

 he became a coflector, and gave his hfe to describing and 

 classifying the myriad forms in which hfe presents itself. 

 Slowly a certain order did emerge from all this variety as 

 the work of the classifiers gave rise to one of the great 

 scientific generalizations — the idea of evolution. But the 

 typical biologist still gets his most immediate pleasures 

 from contemplating particular bits or pieces of life that 

 present themselves immediately to his senses. Today, per- 

 haps, the blackbird's wing and the jeweled moth have 

 given way to an almost perfect photograph of a cell taken 

 with the electron miscroscope, but it is the immediate 

 sensory experience of beauty that sustains most biologists 

 in the often frustrating task of untangling the complex 

 network of interrelationships which is life. 



The difference between the two broad fields that deal 

 with hving and nonliving matter is also related to another 

 difference in the people who pursue them. By and large, 

 physicists seem to make their major contributions relatively 

 early in Hfe. What the patent office calls "a flash of genius" 

 seems to inspire them to predict the existence of a new 

 particle or to develop a new picture of the atom while they 

 are still in their twenties or early thirties. The rapidity with 

 which some physicists have estabUshed their scientific repu- 

 tations has permitted some of them to become interested 

 in extending their speculations into other spheres in the 

 hope of providing an orderly understanding of the universe 

 in general. Although the statistics are not easy to come by, 



