Tributes 



scattered among the Reports, from 1905 to 1912, of a number of 

 Investigation Committees of the British Association, of which he acted 

 as Secretary, as well as in communications to the International Physio- 

 logical Congresses of Cambridge, Brussels and Heidelberg. There was 

 also a most valuable review by him, on work up to 1908 on blood-gas 

 exchanges in different organs, in Ergebnisse der Physiologie, Vol. 7. 

 All those who are to follow me had to some extent the privilege, which 

 I never enjoyed, of working at one time or another in close association 

 with Barcroft and directly sharing his scientific activities. Most of the 

 work of which I have spoken was done in fact after 1900, when I left 

 Cambridge, and I saw him thereafter only occasionally. 



There is a record as early as the beginning of 1895, in his second 

 undergraduate year, of Barcroft's first public scientific utterance ; in his 

 Christmas vacation he addressed the Natural History Society of Belfast 

 on surface tension. At that period he was enterprising in his scientific 

 interests beyond the range of anything which could have been regarded 

 as his special subject. It was he, for example, who borrowed a 

 Crookes's tube from the Cavendish Laboratory almost as soon as the 

 news of Rontgen 's discovery reached Cambridge, and enabled a meeting 

 of the Natural Science Club in his rooms to take what may have been 

 the first x-ray photograph produced in this country. In later years, 

 of course, he had to bring his interests to a focus, or a succession of 

 such, but he never lost that air of youthful enthusiasm, the attitude 

 which regarded research as an amusing adventure. In many v/ays he 

 seemed to have the ideal research temperament, not over-elated by 

 success or cast down by lack of it, or put out of countenance by the 

 unexpected. He never lost his eagerness, but always tempered it with 

 a humorous equanimity. And I know that you will all share my feeling 

 of what physiology owed, in Cambridge, in Britain and in all the world, 

 and what we who loved him owed individually to his buoyant comrade- 

 ship, and to the solid goodness, the loyalty, the generosity and the 

 unpretentious friendliness, which made it so easy for many to work 

 with him and to follow where he led. 



Professor A. S. Krogh 



I have only a few quite personal memories to relate about my old 

 friend Barcroft. I met Barcroft for the first time at the International 

 Congress of Physiology in Heidelberg in 1907 and that was, I believe, 



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