f a party, appears
to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British
matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I
do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I
possess has taught me to regard school, parties, and sects as
arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate
all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's,
or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it
altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire
of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the
kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit
of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am,
and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever
proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned,
thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but
do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own
laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions
the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.

In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught
as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn
from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized
common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the
ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative
to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until
adequate proof is forthcoming.

XI

METHODS OF WORK

Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his
insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by
others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not
only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested
him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself
before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of
spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations
was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great
trouble in the Navy--namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully
prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were
opened, to be full of maggots.

His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections
by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the
essential point withou