658 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
middle ages. We have received this name from our fore- 
fathers, and it already appears distinctly in the sixteenth 
century. We possess several works of that time which put 
forward contagium animatum as a scientific doctrine, with 
the same confidence, with the same sort of proof, with 
which the ' Plastidulic soul' is now set forth." 
These speculations of our "forefathers" will appeal 
differently to different minds. By some they will be 
dismissed with a sneer; to others they will appeal as proofs 
of genius on the part of those who enunciated them. 
There are men, and by no means the minority, who, how- 
ever wealthy in regard to facts, can never rise into the 
region of principles; and they are sometimes intolerant of 
those who can. They are formed to plod meritoriously on 
the lower levels of thought, unpossessed of the pinions 
necessary to reach the heights. They cannot realize the 
mental act the act of inspiration it might well be called 
by which a man of genius, after long pondering and 
proving, reaches a theoretic conception which unravels 
and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation and 
experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, 
who at the present moment stand in this relation to Mr. 
Darwin. For my part, I should be inclined to ascribe to 
penetration rather than to presumption the notion of a 
contagium animatum. He who invented the term ought, 
I think, to be held in esteem; for he had before him tho 
quantity of fact, and the measure of analogy, that would 
justify a man of genius in taking a step so bold. " Never- 
theless," says Professor Virchow, " no one was able 
throughout a long time to discover these living germs of 
disease. The sixteenth century did not find them, nor did 
the seventeenth, nor the eighteenth." But it may be 
urged, in reply to this, that the theoretic conjecture often 
legitimately comes first. It is the forecast of genius which 
anticipates the fact and constitutes a spur toward its dis- 
covery. If, instead of being a spur, the theoretic guess 
rendered men content with imperfect knowledge, it would 
be a thing to be deprecated. But in modern investigation 
this is distinctly not the case; Darwin's theory, for ex- 
ample, like the undulatory theory, has been a motive 
power and not an anodyne. "At last," continues Profes- 
sor Virchow, "in the nineteenth century we have begun 
little by little really to find contayia animata." So much 
