n his laboratory, attend his lectures, study disease, and be
a scientific doctor, dozens of us were infected by his contagious
enthusiasm. He proclaimed the gospel of germs; and the germ of his own
zeal flew abroad in the hospital: it ran through the wards as if it were
typhoid fever. Within a few months, half the students were converted
from lukewarm observers of medical routine into flaming apostles of the
new methods.

The greatest authority in Europe on comparative anatomy, now that Huxley
was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of
medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous
analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall,
thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he
represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute
self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious
abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for
life. His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled
in one wave-like inward sweep where it turned and rested on the stooping
shoulders. His pale face was clean-shaven, save for a thin and wiry
grizzled moustache, which cast into stronger relief the deep-set,
hawk-like eyes and the acute, intense, intellectual features. In some
respects, his countenance reminded me often of Dr. Martineau's: in
others it recalled the knife-like edge, unturnable, of his great
predecessor, Professor Owen. Wherever he went, men turned to stare at
him. In Paris, they took him for the head of the English Socialists; in
Russia, they declared he was a Nihilist emissary. And they were not
far wrong--in essence; for Sebastian's stern, sharp face was above all
things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering
pursuit in life--the sacred thirst of knowledge, which had swallowed up
his entire nature.

He WAS what he looked--the most single-minded person I have ever come
across. And when I say single-minded, I mean just that, and no more. He
had an End to attain--the advancement of science, and he went straight
towards the End, looking neither to the right nor to the left for
anyone. An American millionaire once remarked to him of some ingenious
appliance he was describing: "Why, if you were to perfect that
apparatus, Professor, and take out a patent for it, I reckon you'd make
as much money as I have made." Sebastian withered him with a glance. "I