Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/282

278 Early in 1906 Schaudinn was appointed zoologist to the Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases at Hamburg, a position that he gladly accepted, because it gave him perfect freedom for his studies and for the first time in his career an income that freed him from financial cares. But within a few months he fell a victim to intestinal abscesses, from which he had suffered for years and which he may have contracted through infection during his studies on the protozoa of the human intestine.

Most of Schaudinn's memoirs were briefly and concisely written, for he disliked to take time from his observations to put it on writing. As Richard Hertwig says of him, 'he was not a man of the writing table.' With his death, accordingly, as in the case of other great men, many of his important results have been lost to science. His descriptions are remarkable for their lucidity, as his experiments for their simplicity.

He was essentially a phylogenist, an investigator of racial history by the analysis of individual life cycles, and his achievements furnish the best possible evidence of the fruitfulness of phylogenetic study. He never called in to his aid hypothetical units, but each and every step in his conclusions was based directly upon empirical evidence; he was not a theorist, but a demonstrator. Cytology has to thank him for tracing the genesis of the centrosome, of chromosome reduction and conjugation; biology in general for demonstrating the necessity of considering the life cycle as a unit, and for having so greatly extended our knowledge of life cycles; medicine recognizes his lasting influence in the study of malaria, as the discoverer of the disease germs of dysentery and syphilis, and for pointing out the methods to follow in the study of protozoan disorders.