172 ERYTHEA. 
that is, a man who works at many branches of science, not 
merely a specialist in one.’ This is no doubt true, but does 
not exactly hit off the distinction between the kind of study 
which has gone out of fashion and that which has come in. 
The older workers in biology were occupied mainly with the 
external or, at any rate, grosser features of organisms and 
their relation to surrounding conditions; the modern, on the 
other hand, are engaged on the study of internal and inti- 
mate structure. Work in the laboratory, with its necessary 
limitations, takes the place of research in the field. One 
may almost, in fact, say that the use of the compound 
microscope divides the two classes. Asa Gray has compared 
Robert Brown with Darwin as the ‘two British naturalists’ 
who have, ‘more than any others, impressed their influence 
upon science in the nineteenth century.’ 2° Now it is note- 
worthy that Robert Brown did all his work with a simple 
microscope. And Francis Darwin writes of his father: ‘It 
strikes us nowadays as extraordinary that he should have had 
no compound microscope when he went his “Beagle” 
voyage; but in this he followed the advice of Robert Brown, 
who was an authority on such matters’ (i. 145). One often 
meets with persons, and sometimes of no small eminence, 
who speak as if there were some necessary antagonism 
between the old and the new studies. Thus I have heard a 
vet ees systomatist describe the maeruneope as a curse, 
and ano less fa herbarium 
having its plover place on a bonfire. To me I confess this 
anathematisation of the instruments of research proper to any 
branch of our subject is not easily intelligible. Yet in the 
case of Darwin himself it is certain that if his earlier work 
may be said to rest solely on the older methods, his later 
researches take their place with the work of the new school. 
At our last meeting Pfeffer vindicated one of his latest and 
most important observations. 
The case of Robert Brown is even more striking. He is 
20 Nature, x. 80. 
