144 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



thinking of an unguarded moment, the faithful observa- 

 tion of months. 



Now the study of history, whilst it cannot exclude 

 error, completes and rounds off the learning of the 

 modern schools, and assists in keeping the worker within 

 his limits. It carries him into a quaint and unaccus- 

 tomed atmosphere. It flogs his imagination. He can 

 foregather with men, surely as great as any now, and 

 with this added advantage. He can see them as they 

 really are, his judgment preserves its sense of proportion, 

 and the genius of the old masters is neither magnified 

 nor obscured by the closeness of the observer. When 

 Robert Boyle approaches him and says — I have demon- 

 strated the Spring of the Air, he replies — excellent, 

 admitted, but why did you advise me to cure my 

 complaints by frying a live toad on a shovel and hanging 

 its ashes round my neck. In this common paternity of 

 a great discovery and a fragment of romantic 

 mediaevalism, we detect the rattle of the skeleton in the 

 cerebral cupboard. The human mind is good only in 

 parts, and the man of genius is discovered as mortal. 

 Thus history teaches us to be cautious in honouring the 

 drafts of authority, and to accept a statement, not 

 because it is made by Galen, and endorsed by the Society 

 of the Curious in Natural History, but because it is 

 sound. 



But there is another, and to me a greater, reason 

 why the history of Biology should be cultivated. It 

 introduces the element of literary interest, perhaps not 

 the least important of the differences which separate the 

 unimaginative from the creative artist. Philemon 

 Holland's translation of Pliny's History of the World, 

 published in 1601, is an education in the formidable 

 combination of literature and science. The honours 



