( 117 ) 



" Those who attempt to explain the putrefaction of animal substances by the 

 presence of animalcules," wrote Liebig, " argue much in the same way as a child who 

 imagines he can explain the rapidity of the Rhine's flow by attributing it to the violent 

 agitation caused by the numerous water wheels of Mainz, in the neighbourhood of 

 Bingen. Can we legitimately regard plants and animals as the means whereby other 

 organisms are destroyed, when their own constituent elements are condemned to undergo 

 the same series of putrefaction phenomena as the creatures which preceded them 1 If 

 the fungus is the agent of the oak's destruction, if the microscopic animalcule is the 

 agent in the putrefaction of the elephant's carcase, I ask in my turn, what is the agent 

 which works the putrefaction of the fungus and the microscopic animalcule when life 

 has been removed from these two organized bodies?" (J. Liebig). 



"No; there is to-day no known circumstance which permits us to affirm that 

 microscopic beings have come into the world without germs, without parents like unto 

 themselves. Those who hold that they do have been the plaything of illusions, of 

 experiments badly made, tainted with errors, which they have not known how to 

 perceive, or which they have not known how to avoid." " La ge'ne'ration spontanee est 

 une chimere." (Pasteur). 



ALEXANDER MONRO (I.). 



1697-1767. 



" Young Monro was fortunate in having a father whose high professional and 

 social position secured his son every advantage of education and social position which 

 Edinburgh and her University could give, and whose chief care and pleasure was the 

 education of his only child." (J. Struthers, The Edinburgh Anal. ScJiool, 1867.) 



A MONRO primus, after studying under Cheselden, went to 

 • France and Holland, and in 1718 worked under Boerhaave, 

 who at that time was fifty-one years of age. On his return to 

 Edinburgh, at the age of twenty-two, he was elected Professor of 

 Anatomy in the University. His collected works were published by 

 his son, Monro secundus, in 1781. The portrait is taken from this 

 volume. It is said that Lavater fell in love with the face. Monro 

 has the chief merit in the establishment of the Royal Infirmary, and 

 of a society which became incorporated as the Royal Society of 

 Edinburgh. 



" He had to do a new thing in Edinburgh — to teach anatomy, and to provide for 

 the study of it, in a town of then only 30,000 inhabitants, and in a half-civilized and 

 politically disturbed country. He had to gather in students, to persuade others to join 

 with him in teaching, and to get an infirmary built. All this he did, and at the same 

 time established his fame not only as a teacher but as a man of science, and gave a name 

 to the Edinburgh school which benefited still more the generation which followed him. 

 This really great and good man, therefore, well earned the title, often given to him, of 

 Father of the Edinburgh Medical School." 



In 1754 his son A. MONRO secundus (1733-1817) was appointed 

 his colleague and successor at the age of twenty-one. He lived with 

 and studied under the famous Meckel, and on his return to Edinburgh 



GG 



