68 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



My copy of the "Comparative Physiology" (writes Mr. 

 Thiselton-Dyer, F.R.S.) bears the date 1854. A good deal has 

 been added to biological knowledge since then ; but in my 

 opinion there is no modern book which, taken as a whole, sur- 

 passes it in firm grasp of general principles and in clear and 

 ordered exposition of details to anything like the degree that it 

 itself did the literature contemporary with it. I suppose few 

 of the younger men read it now. Yet I am convinced it would 

 well repay them for the trouble. Only recently, in a paper sub- 

 mitted for my opinion, I found the principle of the antithesis 

 between vegetative and reproductive activity in the organism 

 set forth by the writer as something novel, in utter unconscious- 

 ness apparently of the fact that it is stated and enforced with 

 extreme precision by Dr. Carpenter. 



The book itself may not be read, but, as is always the case 

 with good work, its influence, far from being spent, was never 

 more a living force amongst English teachers of science than at 

 the present moment. The doctrine so emphatically taught by 

 Professor Huxley that Botany and Zoology are but branches 

 of a common discipline — Biology, was Dr. Carpenter's cardinal 

 idea. In so far, then, as English biological science has to-day a 

 broad and far-seeing scope, and, above all, looks for ideas of the 

 widest generality in the accumulation of facts and observations, 

 to Dr. Carpenter's influence must in my judgment be undoubt- 

 edly attributed no small share in the success it has achieved. 



One feature of Dr. Carpenter's writings astonishes me now, 

 perhaps, even more than it did thirty years ago. One is ac- 

 customed nowadays to huge books which are vast receptacles 

 of knowledge, and tell the student more than he wants to know 

 about everything. The aggregation of such pieces of literature 

 is, after all, little more than mechanical. The actual facts cited 

 often seem in collision, and left to fight it out among them- 

 selves ; they are rarely examined critically ; still more rarely are 

 they summed up from a single point of view. This was not Dr. 

 Carpenter's method : in marshalling the contents of an infinite 

 number of detached memoirs, he seems to me unsurpassed ; he 

 had the double gift of both selecting what was significant and of 

 emphasizing its significance in connection with general prin- 

 ciples. Whatever he took into his mind was digested and 



