VOCATION VERSUS AVOCATION 



And in any one of these fields you might become a 

 discoverer of new facts a veritable explorer of the un- 

 known while yet you worked only as an amateur. 

 Herschel electrified the world with the discovery of 

 the planet Uranus while he was still a musician by 

 profession. Olbers, another great figure in the history 

 of astronomy, remained an amateur all his life. He 

 was a physician by profession, like so many other 

 path-makers in the field of science, witness, for exam- 

 ple, Black, the chemist, Hutton, the geologist, the 

 marvellous Thomas Young; Erasmus Darwin, who 

 preceded his grandson as an evolutionist; Mayer, 

 the discoverer of the law of the conservation of energy; 

 Leidy, the American palaeontologist; and Huxley, 

 the great protagonist of evolution. All of these and 

 the list might be indefinitely lengthened were men 

 who at least began their career of discovery while 

 practising medicine as a means of livelihood. 



Nor need we confine such a list to the record of 

 achievements in scientific lines. Oliver Goldsmith, 

 Thomas Smollett, and Frederick Schiller were all 

 trained to the medical profession; and Jean Astruc 

 was court physician to Louis XIV at the time when 

 he published the work that laid the foundation of the 

 modern methods of so-called Higher Criticism of the 

 Bible. 



Such cases show that the avocation may lie far afield 

 from the line of every-day practical activity. Part of 

 them suggest also that the avocation may presently 

 supersede the vocation; but there can be no possible 

 objection to that, in case the apostate has demonstrated 



