C. S. Roy. 135 



has followed with success. The inferences to be drawn from mere 

 anatomical study of structural changes induced by disease he con- 

 sidered to have been for the time being practically exhausted. Indeed 

 he thought much toil had been wasted in pushing such observation 

 into confines of hair-splitting minuteness. Not that he took little 

 interest in microscopy. New methods of staining tissues, of colouring 

 bacteria, and of following the appearances of cell-life appealed to him 

 .strongly, and he was early to follow them. It was rather that the 

 laborious unravelling of an individual autopsy by prolonged anatomical 

 .search and argument seemed to him unfruitful, and he gave little 

 time to it. He looked for inspiration to physical and chemical and 

 physiological methods. He declared the relative paucity of the 

 British contribution to pathological discovery in his own and the 

 preceding generation due to allotment of an excessive time in the 

 medical schools to mere dissecting-room work. He maintained that 

 this rather closed than opened the mind for the broad problems of 

 medicine, and that in addition it left the student unequipped for 

 scientific lines of research. His own ingenuity in devising and his 

 skill in using mechanical apparatus might be termed, as Kiihne 

 expressed it, quite " extraordinary." It was to a certain extent 

 harmful to the quality of his work : it limited the scope with which 

 he undertook and the depth to which he pursued a subject; it 

 continually tempted him to wander from investigations towards which 

 he had already accomplished the preliminaries to open fresh ground 

 in some other direction. A plan usual with him in his own work 

 was to set before himself some particular measurement, e.g., the 

 change in volume of an organ under certain conditions ; the more 

 difficult the experiment the more attraction it had for him; he 

 devised appropriate apparatus, tried it, altered it, made it successful, 

 obtained a limited number of complete observations, and then moved 

 to another problem often not cognate with that previously taken up. 

 As an operator in the laboratory he had no equal in this country. 

 His scientific papers were all written in a brief, simple, and direct 

 style, without repetition of statement, almost always with exclusion 

 of all protocols of experiments, and usually without even any final 

 recapitulation. 



As a teacher his career commenced and ended at Cambridge. His 

 lectures, especially those on the circulation, were effective mainly by 

 their striking originality. In the students who attended his classes 

 for ordinary examination purposes he took curiously little interest ; 

 whether they passed or failed, attended or did not attend, seemed to 

 go quite unnoted by him. To those who came to pursue research, 

 even of the most unambitious kind, he was a different man. To 

 these he gave time and thought unstintingly. He treated them 



