To the inventive activity of the discoverer he had already united the patient skill of the observer and the practical sagacity of the experimentalist.
Thus if it calculates the result of some experiment, it is not the experimentalist's well-attested results which are on their trial, but the basis of the calculation.
Kolbe was a very successful teacher, a ready and vigorous writer, and a brilliant experimentalist whose work revealed the nature of many compounds the composition of which had not previously been understood.
The accuracy of the work in each case depends principally on the skill and ingenuity of the experimentalist in devising methods of eliminating the various sources of error.
In 1871 the Anatomical Act of 1832 was amended; and in 1876 the Vivisection Act was passed, a measure which investigators engaged in the medical sciences of physiology and pathology resented as likely to prevent in England the advance of knowledge of living function, both in its normal balance and in its aberrancies, and moreover to slacken that habit of incessant reference of propositions to verification which is as necessary to the clinical observer as to the experimentalist.