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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/279

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FRITZ SCHAUDINN
275

in solving each complex life cycle that he undertook to investigate. All his discoveries were comprehensive and thorough, they settled the particular questions examined, and this though he selected problems the most difficult of solution. By all his training he was a zoologist, and he is a splendid instance of the fact that comprehensive results in medicine are possible only to him who has a broad biological foundation on which to build. The study of human disease is to be successful not so much by close study of human parasites only, but rather by investigation, through broad comparisons, of the animal and plant groups to which the parasites belong; in that method only is surety given.

For two years it was my privilege to work in the same room with Schaudinn as a fellow student, in the Zoologisches Institut at Berlin; accordingly, this little account of his life is as much the message of a friend as of an admirer. Of the group of students at that laboratory from 1891 on, Schaudinn was the leader from his great and rare natural modesty, as well as from his forceful character and power of tremendous application. With regard to the latter quality I well recall how on one occasion, while with exquisite ardor he was following the stages of a life cycle, he spent more than thirty uninterrupted hours at his microscope. With all his humor, his hearty laugh and his popularity, he rarely spent an evening at the Weinstube or the Bierhalle, but for his recreation took long walks into the countryside, showing a delight in every phase of nature. Perhaps the chief secret of his success was his almost intuitive ability to select the important phenomenon from the less important, and to focus his mind on that; he never allowed himself to become bewildered by the multitude of the facts, truly a rare gift.

Immediately after his death there appeared an appreciative account of his life by his old teacher, Professor Karl Heider, of Innsbrück; then a second by Professor Gary N. Calkins, of Columbia University, this printed in Science; and within the past two months more detailed biographical accounts by Professor Kichard Hertwig, of Munich, and F. W. Winter, of Frankfurt-am-Main. The last named is the most complete yet given, and was published in the Zoologischer Anzeiger, November 13; it gives a careful analysis of his various papers and labors, together with a complete bibliography.

Fritz Eichard Schaudinn was born in Röseningken in East Prussia in 1871. In the laboratory of F. E. Schulze in Berlin he commenced his investigations on Protozoa in 1892. His first years there were devoted to the investigation of free-living species, both freshwater and marine, and the rhizopods in particular. Before he made his doctorate he settled a long controversy by demonstrating that the two forms of many-chambered foraminifera, those with a large and those with a