3io HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



LIV. GREAT EXAMPLES. 



If any of us were called upon to name the greatest 

 biologists of the nineteenth century, we should not go 

 far wrong if we chose Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur. 

 For the work of these two men has profoundly affected both 

 thought and practice ; many days can hardly pass with- 

 out the biologist or physician, to say nothing of the 

 chemist, having to recall some investigation by Darwin 

 or Pasteur, relating it may be to the cross-fertilisation 

 of flowers, the movements of plants, climbing plants, the 

 descent of man, the supposed spontaneous generation of 

 living things, the nature of fermentations, the role of 

 minute organisms in disease, or the prevention of diseases 

 caused by minute organisms. The labours of Cuvier, 

 Humboldt, Robert Brown, Johannes Miiller, Baer, Bernard 

 and Owen are for ever memorable, but even these men 

 did not, like Darwin and Pasteur, act powerfully upon 

 the whole generation of scientific workers among whom 

 they lived. 



It is remarkable that neither the one nor the other was 

 a professed biologist. After returning from the voyage 

 of the Beagle, Darwin must have considered himself a 

 working geologist ; after the monograph on the Cirripedes, 

 he must have considered himself a working zoologist ; and 

 after the treatises on orchids, climbing plants and insecti- 

 tivorous plants he must have considered himself a working 

 botanist, but always with considerable reserves. In his 

 own eyes Darwin ranked as a self-taught, half-trained 

 man, needing at every turn the advice and help of regular 

 students. Pasteur, though he had the courage to discuss 

 disease among physicians and to set the physicians right, 

 though he identified many obscure organisms and in- 

 vestigated their mode of life, had always to disclaim the 

 attainments of the biological specialist. Neither Darwin 

 with his pass-degree, nor Pasteur with his purely chemical 



