152 THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS 



hut from the known to the unknown, from truths either 

 discovered by steady effort or stumbled on by accident 

 to new truths springing out of past acquisitions, and 

 verified by observation or experiment. Biologists, like 

 other scientific discoverers, have a rugged peak to climb, 

 and are often urged to try this or that infallible method 

 of Bacon, Descartes or Comte, a method which generally 

 turns out to be either misleading or impracticable. 

 There is but one way — to wriggle up as you can, 

 sometimes taking to the right, sometimes to the left, 

 sometimes turning back, because what looked like a 

 promising opening proves to lead nowhere. It is a great 

 thing to possess natural aptitude for the work, a great 

 thing too to be obstinately bent on getting to the top, 

 but the successful climber often owes much to good- 

 luck wisely turned to account. 



Malpighi had the notion of verifying his conjectures 

 by experiment, but most of his experiments on plants 

 were so crudely devised, and so imperfectly followed up 

 that they came to nothing. When he wished to discover 

 whether the earth could of itself bring forth plants, he 

 dug up earth from a depth, covered it with a piece of 

 silk, and watched to see whether plants would appear 

 on it. When a question arose as to the use of the 

 cotyledons, he cut them off to see whether the seedling 

 would develop without them. He investigated nutrition 

 through the roots by setting plants in pots, and cover- 

 ing the earth with sulphur, sea-salt, slaked lime, wine, 

 &c. Beans were laid in water, which was covered with 

 oil, to see whether they would germinate. A worker 

 with a talent for experiment might try such things 

 as these, but he would not have accepted failure so 

 easily as Malpighi did, nor would he have printed a 

 string of experiments which had taught him nothing. 



