COLLECTION OF PLANTS MADE BY LATE LORD LISTER. 105
his mind that he would become a surgeon when he was a man
and he would amuse himself by preparing the skeletons of small
animals and in learning their anatomy. After school days
spent at Hitchin and Tottenham, he went to University College,
and worked for the matriculation examination of the University
of London. It was there, under the teaching of John Lindley,
the Professor of Botany, that he first began to study plants.
I have often heard him speak with admiration of the lucid
discourses Lindley gave his students, and how he inspired their
enthusiasm. The concise definitions he gave of botanical
terms and the simple formulae by which the commoner natural
orders of plants could be recognised were never forgotten by
my uncle, and were passed on by him in the delightful lessons
he gave to some of his nephews and nieces. Lindley's Elements
of Botany ends with the following rather sententious passage :
"Experience shows that the foregoing points are among those
which conduce most to the students' satisfactory progress,
but neither they nor any others have real value in the absence
of method, zeal and perseverance." I think it may be said
that my uncle possessed these qualities in a marked degree.
This is not the occasion to dwell at length on his achieve-
ments in surgery, but I may refer briefly to some incidents
in his life.
After completing his medical course at University College,
he went, in 1853, to Edinburgh, where the school of surgery was
then in many ways ahead of anything in London. In 1859
he became Professor of Surgery at Glasgow. It was at Glasgow
that his attention was drawn to the recent writings of the great
French chemist, Louis Pasteur, who had made the discovery
that putrefaction was a form of fermentation caused by the
action of "germs" or micro-organisms. This discovery gave
Lister the light for which he had long been seeking, and suggested
to him that the painful inflammation following almost every
operation at that time, and the resulting high rate of mortality
among the patients in even the best hospitals, might be due,
to the infection of the wounds by harmful germs ; and if these
germs could be destroyed and the wounds kept clean by the
use of suitable disinfectants, nature might be relied on to carry
out the healing process. This was the principle on which he