It is as easy to find all these qualities separate as it is to turn
beneath the finger one of the letters of a revolving padlock. But
they must all be brought together in line before the grand portals
of Nature's hypaethral temple will open to her chosen student. How
incomplete the man of science is with only one or two of these
endowments may be seen by a few examples.
The power and instinct of observation combined with the most
consummate skill do not necessarily make a great philosophical
naturalist. Leeuwenhoek had all these. They bore admirable fruits,
too. We cannot but read the old man's letters to the Royal Society,
written, if we remember right, after the age of eighty, with delight
and admiration. Those little lenses in their silver mountings, all
ground and set and fashioned by his own hand, showed him the
blood-globules, and the "pipes" of the teeth, which Purkinje and
Retzius found with their achromatic microscopes a century later. We
honor his skill and sagacity as they deserve; but a little trick of
Mr. Dollond's, applied to the microscopic object-glass, has left all
his achievements a mere matter of curious history.
Few have been more remarkable for perceiving resemblances and
differences than Oken. This is the poetical side of the scientific
mind; and he shares with Goethe the honor of that startling and
far-reaching discovery, the vertebral character of the bones of the
cranium.
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