266 PERSONAL PREPARATION FOR RESEARCH. 



is nine years old it is taken to Venice, and placed under 

 the tuition of Sebastian Zuccato. Afterwards he goes to 

 Bellini's school, and there gets acquainted with another 

 student, one year his junior, whose name is Barbarelli. 

 They live together and work together in Venice ; then 

 young Barbarelli (known to posterity as Giorgio ne), after 

 putting on certain spaces of wall and squares of canvas 

 such colour as the world had never before seen, dies, in his 

 early manhood, and leaves Vecellio, whom we call Titian," 

 to work on there in Venice, till the plague stays his hand, 

 in his hundredth year The genius came into the world, 

 but all the possibilities of his development depended upon 

 the place and the time. He came exactly in the right 

 place, and precisely at the right time. To be born not 

 far from Venice, in the days of Bellini, to be taken there 

 at nine years old, to have Giorgione for one's comrade, 

 all this was as fortunate for an artistic career as the cir- 

 cumstances of Alexander of Macedon were for a career of 

 conquest.' l 



To be born before the time is almost as unfortunate as 

 to be behind it ; all original scientific investigators must, 

 however, be more or less in advance of their time, other- 

 wise they cannot be original at all. A scientific investi- 

 gator may be before his age in more ways than one. Thus 

 he may imagine and publish advanced and true hypo- 

 theses, the complete proof of which cannot be discovered 

 until a later period. This was the case with Avogadro 

 and his hypothesis that equal volumes of different gases 

 contain equal numbers of molecules ; and is probably the 

 case with some existing eminent men, and their hypotheses. 

 Or, he may, as Galileo did, and Bruno shortly before him, 

 publish his views and the proofs of them at the same time. 

 But, in either of these cases, if the views he publishes, or 

 1 Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, p. 442. 



