Tributes 



Professor R. A. Peters 



Much has been said so well in the preceding tributes that all I can 

 possibly do is to fill in a few gaps, which may recall one or two points 

 others have forgotten. I first came really into contact with Barcroft 

 when I joined the advanced class in physiology for Part II of the Natural 

 Sciences Tripos ; this was in 1910, and I knew him as a most inspiring 

 teacher. I well remember now the interest of his lectures on contro- 

 versies connected with the sub-maxillary gland, and they were always 

 lectures which made us think. One of the subjects to which he devoted 

 a great deal of thought himself was the question, so controversial then, 

 of the secretion of oxygen in the lung. As has been said by others, he 

 was first and foremost a biologist, and I feel that it was always a great 

 disappointment to him that he could not get evidence for the secretion 

 of oxygen himself ; he would have liked this. I spent two years over 

 Part II, and that was how I came to go behind the well-known green 

 baize curtain, which has been mentioned. Oddly enough I cannot 

 remember positively how I came to start work on the specific oxygen 

 capacity of the blood. Having two years to spend upon Part II, I 

 suppose that it was considered that I could spare a little time for 

 research ; so far as I remember I had even started to make a few 

 observations with Hopkins on creatinine. But how that became diverted 

 into research on blood is a mystery. I think Barcroft must have come 

 along one day and said : ' Peters, can you help me ? ' The green baize 

 curtain was very close to the advanced class room. 



In that first chapter of his book to which Professor Hill has referred, 

 altogether too much was devoted to myself. It was Barcroft's plan that 

 the relation between iron and oxygen in haemoglobin should be 

 settled chemically and that I tried to do for him. He v/as behind the 

 work all the time and taught me to work with differential apparatus, 

 with which I am still working in a different form. His capacity for 

 knowing just when to help a research worker and when to leave him 

 alone was extraordinary. He was there when you wanted him but when 

 you wanted to be by yourself, he knew how to leave you. This rare 

 quality is an important one. I can also recall coming back to the 

 Physiological Laboratory in Cambridge after World War I ; there 

 was someone trying to do an operation which I could do, taught by 

 Barcroft, and I was getting irritated because I felt that I could do it 

 better. He beckoned me out of the room and closed the door saying : 



20 



