

WORK. 149 



was just these things that he seized on to make a start from. 

 In a certain sense there is nothing special in this procedure, 

 many discoveries being made by means of it. I only mention 

 it because, as I watched him at work, the value of this power 

 to an experimenter was so strongly impressed upon me. 



Another quality which was shown in his experimental work, 

 was his power of sticking to a subject ; he used almost to 

 apologise for his patience, saying that he could not bear to 

 be beaten, as if this were rather a sign of weakness on his 

 part. He often quoted the saying, " It's dogged as does it ;" 

 and I think doggedness expresses his frame of mind almost 

 better than perseverance. Perseverance seems hardly to 

 express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal 

 itself. He often said that it was important that a man should 

 know the right point at which to give up an inquiry. And 

 I think it was his tendency to pass this point that inclined 

 him to apologise for his perseverance, and gave the air of 

 doggedness to his work. 



He often said that no one could be a good observer unless 

 he was an active theoriser. This brings me back to what 

 I said about his instinct for arresting exceptions : it was as 

 though he were charged with theorising power ready to flow 

 into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, 

 however small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory, and 

 thus the fact became magnified into importance. In this way 

 it naturally happened that many untenable theories occurred 

 to him ; but fortunately his richness of imagination was 

 equalled by his power of judging and condemning the thoughts 

 that occurred to him. He was just to his theories, and did 

 not condemn them unheard ; and so it happened that he 

 was willing to test what would seem to most people not at 

 all worth testing. These rather wild trials he called " fool's 

 experiments," and enjoyed extremely. As an example I 

 may mention that finding the cotyledons of Biophytum to be 

 highly sensitive to vibrations of the table, he fancied that they 



