Tributes 



years before, but since so little academic physiology was done in World 

 War I, neither were seriously out of date in their subject matter and 

 in their spirit both, I feel, are in many ways fully alive to-day. Bayliss 

 ranged far and wide over physics, chemistry and biology ; his reading 

 was tremendous and might well have overpowered any other man. 

 Yet every one of his chapters was crammed, not only with interesting 

 and varied data, but — more important — with critical opinions and 

 fascinating ideas which linked them all together. It was no wonder 

 that in the early twenties Bayliss Clubs sprang up in different parts of 

 the United States for discussing and working out more fully the ideas 

 he strewed so lavishly through his book. 



Joseph Bancroft's Respiratory Function of the Blood was, in a different 

 way, unique and equally priceless. Instead of ranging over many 

 subjects and the work of many laboratories all over the world, Barcroft 

 concentrated on one particular field, limiting himself very largely to 

 the adventures of his friends and himself therein. As he says in that 

 wonderful preface of his : * I should like to have called the book, what 

 it frankly is — a log ; did not such a title involve an air of flippancy 

 quite out of place in the description of the serious work of a man's life.' 

 The reader is indeed let into the secret of how ideas come to a great 

 investigator, how he tries them out at the laboratory bench, how he 

 prospers for a while, then retires discomfited by inexplicable rebuffs of 

 nature, gets lost for a time in a mist and a morass, then suddenly sees 

 a new light, makes his way out of the bog and the fog and emerges 

 triumphant on to firm and higher ground, from which he sees the older 

 knowledge with new eyes. It is the process which happens over and 

 over again in scientific research, but the details of it are, and probably 

 have to be, pruned so severely out of ordinary scientific papers, that 

 from hundreds of these one could learn less about how actually to do 

 scientific research than one did from one chapter of Barcroft's book. 

 It was no wonder that almost every Cambridge physiologist who began 

 research between 1905 and 1915, did his first job of work under Barcroft 

 — I remember Professor Adrian telling me in 1919 that he was about 

 the only exception to this rule. I remember, also, how one of J. B.'s 

 first American associates after World War I, the late Cecil D. Murray, 

 bounced into the lab. here with the words ' Mr. Barcroft, Lawrence J. 

 Henderson tells me you've written a book which has enough unsolved 

 problems in it to last for twenty-five years. Mr. Barcroft, I want you 

 to know that that's why I've come to work with you.' 



My own first research contact with Barcroft in the Spring of 1920 is 

 only one of probably hundreds of examples of the way in which he 

 delighted to help young scientists forward, but to me it is naturally a 

 vivid and precious one. I had, at that time, to read a paper to the 



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