50 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



burning more or less brilliantly, the torch of progress. 

 There would be, perhaps, twenty men thus engaged, 

 not, as in many laboratories, all working on closely 

 cognate subjects, but each one on matters differing 

 widely, and therefore requiring much greater grasp and 

 attention on the part of the teacher, to whom the 

 initiation and often the general conduct of the research 

 was due. This constant presence of the master, this 

 participation by him in the work of the pupils both 

 young and old, bore in on the minds of all the lesson 

 that it is the personal and daily contact with the leader 

 which creates a successful school ; and that whilst fine 

 buildings and well-equipped laboratories are good 

 things in their way, they are as tinsel and dross, unless 

 accompanied by the devotion and collaboraton of the 

 teacher. 



How, it may well be asked, could Bunsen, thus 

 devoted to supervising the work of others in the 

 laboratory, who had to deliver a lecture every day, 

 and had much perfunctory university business to 

 transact as well how could he possibly find time to 

 carry on laborious experimental investigations of his 

 own ? for he never kept an assistant, as many do, 

 to work at his researches for him, but did all the 

 experimental work with his own deft hands. Well, 

 it is always the busy man who has most time for 

 work or at least who does most and so it was with 

 Bunsen. Spending the whole day in the laboratory, 

 he was often able to spare an hourpr two to devote to 

 his own work, either of devising and testing some new 

 form of apparatus, of separating the rare earth metals, 

 or of preparing and determining the crystalline form of 

 a series of salts. Then he was an early riser, and when 

 I lived with him, I know that it was his habit to rise 

 often before dawn in the summer, to complete an experi- 



