120 Obituary. 
ETHEL SARGANT. 1 
October 28, 1863 — January 16, 1918. 
[With Two Figures in the Text.] 
E THEL Sargant was the daughter of Henry Sargant, barrister- 
at-law, and his wife, Catherine Emma Beale. She was 
educated at the North London Collegiate School under Frances 
Mary Buss, at a time when schools of this type represented an 
adventurous experiment. From 1881 to 1885 she studied natural 
science atGirton College, Cambridge, but nearly all her subsequent 
work was carried out at home, where domestic ties involved contin¬ 
uous demands upon her time and vitality, and often interrupted her 
own private pursuits for long periods together. The conditions of 
her life made any professional undertaking—in the sense of a 
teaching post—impossible for her, but she was far from regretting 
this disability, since she was convinced that lecturing and demon¬ 
strating would, in her case, have paralysed the faculty for original 
work. She was in her element, however, in initiating research 
students into the methods of discovery, and to those who from time 
to time worked under her direction in her little laboratory, she gave 
a unique training. We are here concerned with her rather as a 
botanist than in her human relations, so we must be content with a 
bare allusion to a single aspect of her wise and helpful attitude 
towards younger workers—an aspect which found expression in her 
advice to a student who was hesitating on the threshold of research, 
discouraged by the renunciations to which those who embrace that 
life must be prepared to commit themselves. If after a year of 
tackling some biological problem “ you find yourself,” she wrote. 
“ restless, dissatisfied, half-starved, don’t attempt to follow up that 
line—‘ Look in your heart and write ’ as Sidney said 300 years ago 
.The question is not whether any work you may take up 
will not atrophy some faculties to some degree, It is almost bound 
to do so. But if you have sufficient taste for the work to delight in 
it, appetite will come as you eat, and you will develop not only the 
faculties you use but your whole being through their exercise. 
* Since Ethel Sargant’s death, the fallowing notices of her life and work 
have appeared:—by Dr. D. H. Scott, Annals of Botany, Vol. 32, 1918, pp. i-v; 
see also letter by Dr. Scott in Times Literary Supplement, Thursday, Jan. 31 t 
1918, reprinted in Journal of Bot. Vol. 56,1918, pp. 115-6; by Dr. E. N. Thomas, 
Proc. Linn. Soc. 130th Session, Oct. 1918, pp. 41-42; by the present writer in 
The Cambridge Magazine, Vol. 7, Jan. 26, 1918 p. 361, reprinted in The 
Common Cause, Vol. 9, 1918, p. 567; see also Nature, Vol. 101, 1918, pp. 428- 
9. Reference may also be made to a forthcoming article by the present writer, 
“ Ethel Sargant, 1863-1918, A study of the mind of a morphologist,” in 
Studies in the History of Science, edited by Dr. C. Singer, Vol. III. 
