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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77622 ***




                           BY THE SAME AUTHOR


                   MEN OF THE OLD STONE AGE
                   THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE
                   THE AGE OF MAMMALS
                   EVOLUTION OF MAMMALIAN MOLAR TEETH
                   FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN
                   EVOLUTION AND RELIGION
                   HUXLEY AND EDUCATION




                             IMPRESSIONS OF
                           GREAT NATURALISTS




                    IMPRESSIONS OF GREAT NATURALISTS
       REMINISCENCES OF DARWIN, HUXLEY, BALFOUR, COPE AND OTHERS

                                   BY

                         HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

 RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; SENIOR GEOLOGIST
 IN UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY; PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF
                             NATURAL HISTORY


                       ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS


                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                            NEW YORK · LONDON
                                  1924


                       COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1924, BY
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

                   COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1924, BY SCIENCE
                  COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY GINN AND COMPANY
     COPYRIGHT, 1896, 1909, 1913, 1924, BY POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

                Printed in the United States of America


[Illustration: Emblem of The Scribner Press featuring an open book, a
lamp, and decorative wreaths.]




                                   TO
                             THE MEMORY OF
                THE NATURALISTS, EXPLORERS, AND AUTHORS
                          WHOSE CREATIVE LIVES
                     ARE BRIEFLY TOUCHED UPON HERE

         “... those immortal dead who live again
         In minds made better by their presence: live
         In pulses stirr’d to generosity,
         In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
         For miserable aims that end with self,
         In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
         And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
         To vaster issues.”
                                         —GEORGE ELIOT




                        AUTOBIOGRAPHIC FOREWORD


There is no joy like the joy of creative work. To my mind all great men
are creative, and among the greatest men are the creative naturalists
from Aristotle to Darwin, whose self-effacing lives and enduring works
are our most precious possessions. I like a naturalist better than a
scientist, because there is less of the ego in him, and in a naturalist
like Darwin the ego entirely disappears and through his vision we see
Nature with the least human aberration. These “Impressions” may show the
young and aspiring naturalists of our day that in the highest creative
vision there is the least of self and the most of Nature. In the twelve
lives chosen from the fifty-seven men and women of whom I have
written,[1] I include Roosevelt, Bryce and Butler because as intrepid
explorers and observers they show some of the highest qualities of the
naturalist.


I had the good fortune to lead my student life between 1873 and 1880
under the spiritual, moral, and intellectual influence of the great men
of the Victorian age, the poets Wordsworth and Tennyson, as well as the
natural philosophers Wallace, Darwin, Huxley, and Cope. The scientific
thought of the first half of the nineteenth century was permeated with
the theism of the Special Creation theory of the universe. In those
fateful days of intellectual doubt between the false theism of Special
Creation and the true theism of Evolution, I fortunately came under the
influence of a series of broad-minded teachers, of Arnold Guyot in
geology, of James McCosh in psychology and philosophy, of William M.
Sloane in the philosophy of Kant, of William H. Welch in anatomy and the
study of the Cell; of each of these incomparable teachers I like to
recall that “I too sat at the feet of Gamaliel.” McCosh numbered me in
his favorite group of “eager young men” with the embryonic geologist
Scott and the embryonic philosopher Ormond. Inspired with
self-confidence by him in 1878, I took up original research in
psychology and prepared a questionnaire on visual memory in co-operation
with Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, publishing four
psychological papers at the same time that I was writing my first
palæontological papers on fossil mammals discovered in the Rocky
Mountains in 1877–1878. This work also fitted me to write, ten years
later, “From the Greeks to Darwin,” my inaugural lectures in the
Columbia University Professorship of Biology, the first of a series of
volumes which I edited. While McCosh, to whom I dedicated this
philosophical work, was eager and impetuous and urged the beginning of
observation and research at once, Arnold Guyot, distinguished in the
glaciology of Switzerland, taught that the way of learning is long and
very arduous. I well recall the motto he gave me when I was groaning
over the interminable difficulties of preparing fossils, a motto derived
from Hippocrates and the patient Romans:

        Art is long and difficult; criticism is short and easy.

This indeed is the message of Geology to the student mind and the
underlying reason why Charles Lyell, a geologist, became the master of
Charles Darwin, a biologist. Only from the eternal truths of the earth’s
past history can the immediate present of Life be understood.

Two of my eager Princeton comrades felt the need of anatomy as much as I
did, and without the aid of a teacher we started the dissection of a
fish, guided by Huxley’s “Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates.” This
laborious work on the porgy was followed by an anatomical escapade on
the limb of _Homo sapiens_, part of a human cadaver, in one of the
unused rooms of the Astronomical Observatory which we converted into a
dissecting-room. The venerable astronomer, Professor Stephen Alexander,
wondered at the source of the strange odors that filled the observatory,
but never discovered the cause! These untaught and surreptitious studies
in anatomy led to my coming, in the autumn of 1878, under one of the
greatest teachers of anatomy this country has produced, William H.
Welch, then a junior officer in the Bellevue Medical College. Fresh from
the leading laboratories of Germany, Welch used the Teutonic method I
had not known before, of introducing each of his discourses on the
various kinds of cells with an historical review of discovery, showing
how step by step one discovery in science leads to another. I felt for
the first time the inspiration of the special virtue of German research,
the most thorough and painstaking the world has ever known, the virtue
of _grundlichkeit_, of going to the very bottom of things. Thus were
drawing to a close my six American years when the question of whether I
should go to Germany or to England was decided by a letter from Kitchen
Parker, the distinguished English comparative anatomist and friend of
Huxley, who personally advised me to go to London to study under Huxley
and to Cambridge to study under Balfour.

Never shall I forget my first impression of Francis Maitland Balfour as
I met him in the great court of Trinity College of Cambridge, in the
spring of 1879, to apply for admission to his course in embryology. At
the time he was twenty-eight years of age and I was twenty-one. I felt
that I was in the presence of a superior being, of a type to which I
could never possibly attain, and I did not lose this impression
throughout the spring months in which he lectured on comparative
embryology at Cambridge and in which we enjoyed many long afternoons of
bicycle riding on the level roads of the Fens. I always felt that
Balfour lived in a higher atmosphere, in another dimension of
intellectual space. Not that he was aloof—far from it, for he was always
in closest and most generous touch with the minds of his students; he
made you feel that you had a mind and that your opinion and observation
were of value, although you knew all the while that your mind was still
embryonic and your opinions of the most tentative order. His was by far
the most balanced mind among all the English biologists. He was at the
time absorbed in embryology, which was the reigning biological
discipline of the day. His untimely death in the Swiss Alps in the year
1882 was a tragic loss, because English biologic thought soon entered
the long period of confusion and lack of balance that have characterized
it to the present time. The other great lesson taught by Balfour was
that of the balanced daily life: the morning lecture and tour of the
laboratory, the five quiet hours devoted to his own writing and
research, the vigorous afternoon exercise, and the delightful care-free
and shop-free evening. At the time Balfour was turning out the great
volumes of his “Comparative Embryology,” a monumental work, I asked him
how many hours a day he gave to writing; he replied: “Never more than
five hours.” A fresh mind is far more creative than a jaded mind.

In the autumn of 1879 I moved to London, which was then in the full and
glorious tide of Victorian life. Not a member had fallen out of the
great ranks. I had the good fortune to hear in the scientific societies
some of these great men, such as Clark Maxwell in physics, to meet all
the leading biologists except Wallace, and especially to come under the
commanding personal influence of Huxley. Huxley especially imparted
philosophic breadth, grasp of the whole subject, the force and value of
expression, the wisdom and perception that come from survey of a very
broad field, from both the philosophic and the anatomical standpoint.
His sense of humor was delightful and brightened many of the most
difficult passages in his discourses. By his way of living and by the
unlimited personal sacrifices he made he taught me that we men of
science must do our part in public education. To public service Huxley
sacrificed his life, for not long after his great lecture course of
1879–1880, which I attended and of which I took the fullest notes, he
broke down in health. When I last met him in Cambridge, at the British
Association meeting of 1894, he shook his head sadly and said: “Osborn,
I no longer can keep up with the progress of biology.” Soon after his
death, in 1895, I wrote the reminiscences which appear in this volume
without change.

To Huxley I owe the greatest biological impression that came to me in
England, namely, a few words with Charles Darwin in Huxley’s laboratory.
From the large number of students working there at the time, Huxley
singled me out, perhaps because I was the only American, perhaps because
of my early palæontological writing. I realized that I must make the
most of the opportunity, and for a few moments I gazed steadily into
Darwin’s face and especially into his benevolent blue eyes, which were
almost concealed below the overhanging brows, eyes that seemed to have a
vision of the entire living world and that gave one the impression of
translucent truthfulness. In my address at the Darwin Centenary at
Cambridge I endeavored to convey this profound impression of translucent
truthfulness. Darwin arrived at Evolution not because he desired to do
so, but because he was forced into it by his own observations of Nature.
He came of a long line of compellingly truthful ancestors, and certainly
“truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a distinctly
English and Scotch trait. In my fifty years’ experience with scientific
men I have found them neither more nor less truthful than other men,
because truthfulness does not go on all fours with genius, with powers
of observation and of generalization. Darwin always kept in the realm of
fact; he was equally sincere in the realm of opinion and of theory. If
in the relatively small part of his life that he devoted to speculation
and to theory his contributions are less permanent, it is because, after
all, Nature is unreasonable and irrational in her methods.

On returning to America as a young comparative anatomist I was
privileged to work as a comrade with men with whom I had started as a
disciple. I became more intimate than ever with the Scotchman James
McCosh and enjoyed his eager freshness of mind and desire to gain new
ideas. For a gift on his eightieth birthday his students paraphrased the
lines of Aristophanes: “Honor to the old man who in the declining vigor
of years seeks to learn new subjects and to add to his wisdom.” I had
great reverence for another Scotchman, James Bryce, with his enthusiasm,
his broad learning and experience, his eager reception of new ideas, to
the very end of his life; finally, for that very unique Scotchman, John
Muir. From their simple and hardy mode of living the Scotch contribute
to the students of life enduring impressions of energy, vigor,
youthfulness, and of the most genial and whole-hearted friendship.


In reprinting these “Impressions,” extending over a very long period of
years, from my youthful tribute to Balfour in 1883 to those of John
Muir, John Burroughs, Theodore Roosevelt, and Howard Crosby Butler in
the present decade, may I claim that years of observation have given me
far deeper penetration into the sources of human character and
personality? This penetration is due to my studies in heredity and my
observations on the difference in races and racial characteristics,
which, for example, separate the Scotch from the English and both from
the Irish. Such penetration is carried as far as I am able to do at
present in appreciation of the peculiar genius of John Muir and of John
Burroughs. In contrasting these two friends I asked myself the question:
“Why are they so much alike and why so different?” I believe I have
partly answered this question, but we may go much farther in the
sympathetic biographic analysis of the future. Since I wrote the first
of my biographic studies, the principal titles of which are included in
the appendix of this volume, I have been attempting to penetrate into
human nature along a number of paths: first, along studies of heredity,
already alluded to; second, along studies of the men of the Old Stone
Age and their forebears; third, with the increasing conviction that our
intellectual, moral, and spiritual reactions are extremely ancient and
that they have been built up not in hundreds but in thousands—perhaps
hundreds of thousands—of years. It would, however, take me far beyond
the limits of a foreword to enter upon this deeper interpretation of the
impressions and influences which great minds of great men of different
kinds have exerted upon me.

In these “Impressions” I am not in any case attempting to portray the
whole man, but only one principal aspect of each life. The nearest
approach to a full biographic treatment is the centenary address on the
life and works of Charles Darwin and the memorial address on his
comrade, Alfred Russel Wallace. It was an appreciation which I received
in a letter from Wallace, reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of
this volume, also letters from Mrs. Huxley and her son, from Lady Bryce,
and from friends of John Burroughs and John Muir that first led me to
believe that these biographical sketches would be helpful to young men
and young women who aspire to greatness along different lines of
intellectual endeavor. I have omitted many of my biographic essays
because I was not confident that they would be of interest to laymen as
well as to young scientists, to whom this work is addressed, but I
cannot pass by two of my great palæontological predecessors, Joseph
Leidy and Edward Drinker Cope, because the resemblances and contrasts
between these two men are especially illuminating in scientific life.

Cope was certainly the most brilliant creative mind in comparative
anatomy and evolution that America has produced. Quaker by birth, he was
a fighter by nature, both in theory and in fact. On one occasion, in the
American Philosophical Society, a difference of opinion with his friend
Persifor Frazer led to such a violent controversy that the two
scientists retired to the hallway and came to blows! On the following
morning I happened to meet Cope and could not help remarking on a
blackened eye. “Osborn,” he said, “don’t look at my eye. If you think my
eye is black, you ought to see Frazer this morning!” But such
differences of opinion did not sever the lifelong friendship, and when
Cope died Frazer was the first to pay a glowing tribute to his genius.
Cope was not a single but a multiple personality; he presents the widest
possible contrast to a retiring nature like that of Alfred Russel
Wallace, a sketch of whom opens this volume. Wallace, the last survivor
of the great trio of British naturalists of the nineteenth century,
survived by only a few months another member of the group, Sir Joseph
Hooker, who introduced the famous Darwin-Wallace papers on Natural
Selection to the Linnæan Society in 1858. Lyell, Darwin, and Wallace
were three successive but closely kindred spirits, whose work began and
ended with what will be known as the second great epoch of evolutionary
thought, the first being that of the precursors of Darwin and the third
that in which we live. They established Evolution through a continued
line of attack by precisely similar methods of observation and reasoning
over an extremely broad field.

As to the closeness of the intellectual sequence between these three
men, those who know the original edition of the second volume of Lyell’s
“The Principles of Geology,” published in 1832, must regard it as the
second biologic classic of the century—the first being Lamarck’s
“Philosophie Zoologique,” of 1809—on which Darwin through his higher and
much more creative vision built up his “Journal of Researches.” When
Lyell faltered in the application of his own principles Darwin went on
and was followed by Wallace. The two older men may be considered to have
united in guiding the mind of Wallace, because the young naturalist,
fourteen years the junior of Darwin, took both “The Principles” of Lyell
and “The Journal” of Darwin with him on his journey to South America,
during which his career fairly began.

From his record of observations during his life in the tropics of
America and of Asia Wallace will be remembered not only as one of the
independent discoverers of the theory of Natural Selection but next to
Darwin as one of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century. His
range and originality are astounding in these days of specialization.
His main lines of thought, although in many instances suggested to his
mind somewhat suddenly, were developed and presented in a deliberate and
masterly way through the series of papers and books extending from 1850
to 1913. The highest level of his creative life was, however, reached at
the age of thirty-five, when with Darwin he published his sketch of the
theory of Natural Selection. This outburst of original thought, on which
his reputation will chiefly rest, came as an almost automatic
generalization from his twelve years in the tropics.


The two most powerful men I have known intimately were J. Pierpont
Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt. I had the privilege of calling the former
“Uncle Pierpont” and have vivid recollections of him as he was in 1867,
when I was a boy, and in the last two brilliant decades of his life.
Theodore Roosevelt I knew slightly as a boy, as an intimate friend of my
naturalist brother, Frederick, and in the last two and great decades of
his life as my own friend. Although the man in the street would say that
no two Americans could be further apart than these two, in many
characteristics they were closely similar. The outstanding point of
likeness was their courage in facing obstacles, their dominance in
overcoming difficulties of all kinds. There was no “I can’t” in the
vocabulary of either man; rather “I can and I will.” Close contact with
both of these men enforced the life motto which became my own: _Whatever
is right can be done, and shall be done._ Powerful as both were in
leadership, they always sought the counsel of their friends and were apt
to be governed by it, unless it was the counsel of timidity or of
irresolution. Neither was dominant in the sense that Woodrow Wilson was
dominant and autistic—to use the professional phrase. Both won the
devoted friendship and admiration of hundreds of men and women, and both
made many enemies; through similar virtues Roosevelt became the opponent
of Morgan and Morgan became the opponent of Roosevelt. Both were
intensely patriotic and willing to make any sacrifice, however great,
for their country. Both were deeply religious and were guided by an
unfaltering faith in Divine Providence. The most surprising likeness I
observed was their humility; I never saw a trace of conceit in either
Pierpont Morgan or Theodore Roosevelt. The assurance and self-confidence
they both displayed in critical and commanding moments were part of the
great game of life. Leaders must have broad shoulders, firm necks, and
confident and determined faces when the world is full of doubting
Thomases, as it always is. A marked point of likeness was the power of
immediate, almost instantaneous, decision, which sometimes led both men
astray. Contrasting with their power of command were their simplicity,
their unselfish devotion to their friends, and their love of children
and fascination for children. Both had a deep interest in science; with
Morgan it was mathematics, minerals, and gems, and, in later years,
archæology. Natural history was the first and last love of Theodore
Roosevelt, in all its branches, and special study of birds and mammals
constituted the greatest pleasure of his life.

It will surprise many of my readers that I have instituted such a
comparison, that I have found resemblances amidst the many violent
contrasts in the lives and characters of these two great Americans. It
was the love of nature and of human nature which made them alike. Few of
us are single in our personalities; most of us are dual, and the rare
men like Morgan and Roosevelt are multiple. Among great naturalists
Wallace, Darwin, and Pasteur were men of single natures, whose whole
lives were devoted to single great purposes, to the attainment of which
all other objects in life gave way. They were neither combatant nor
militant, nor did they ever seek to force their theories or opinions by
militant methods. They sought seclusion, avoided public meetings and
controversies, and were astonished by the world-wide acclaim of their
discoveries. It is told of Darwin that after meeting Gladstone he
expressed surprise that such a very great man had paid him so much
attention. It appears that this simplicity of life and avoidance of
renown are most favorable to that creative state of mind which most
frequently engenders renown.

On the other hand, Huxley and Cope were, above all, combatants in the
new social and philosophical arena of Evolution. Huxley’s world-wide
fame rests partly on his defense of freedom of thought and of research
and on the brilliance of his rapier-like thrusts at some of the shams
and hypocrisies of the Special Creation exponents of his day. His genius
lay in polemics, in criticism, in exposition, rather than in creative
discovery and generalization; it is a striking fact that he did not add
a single new principle to the philosophy of Evolution. His life was one
of enforced activity and public service, which left him little or no
repose for creative thought, yet he added to anatomy a number of very
important generalizations. There is no measuring what Huxley might have
done if he had enjoyed the repose that was granted to Darwin. Cope was,
above all, a creative naturalist of a high order, with a rapidity and
originality of thought almost without parallel in the history of
anatomy; great generalizations affecting the order and arrangement of
the whole kingdom of backboned animals arose from his brain, while in
philosophical analysis he was a tyro where Huxley was a master.


From these impressions of the lives of many naturalists we see that the
naturalist is animated first of all by the joy of observation, without
initial hope or thought of discovery but surely in the end leading to
discovery; leading also to creative thought if observation is pursued
with a single eye and unfaltering purpose, regardless of all obstacles
or dangers and of the greatest impediment of all, namely, interest in
self and in self-advancement.




                                CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE
 DEDICATION                                                            v

 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FOREWORD                                           vii

 IMPRESSIONS:

   ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE                                               1
     “Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823–1913”

   CHARLES DARWIN                                                     33
     “Life and Works of Darwin”
     “The Darwin Centenary at Cambridge”

   THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY                                                71
     “A Student’s Reminiscences of Huxley”

   FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR                                           99

   JAMES BRYCE                                                       109

   LOUIS PASTEUR                                                     117
     “The New Order of Sainthood”

   JOSEPH LEIDY                                                      131
     “Joseph Leidy, Founder of Vertebrate Palæontology in America”

   EDWARD DRINKER COPE                                               149
     “A Great Naturalist”

   THEODORE ROOSEVELT                                                165
     “Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist”

   THE TWO JOHNS                                                     183
     “The Racial Soul of John Burroughs”
     “John Muir”

   HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER                                              207
     “Howard Crosby Butler, Explorer”

 BIOGRAPHIES BY THE AUTHOR                                           213




                             ACKNOWLEDGMENT


“The Life and Works of Darwin” was an address delivered at Columbia
University on February 12, 1909, the hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s
birth, as the first of a series of nine lectures on Charles Darwin and
his influence on science. “The Darwin Centenary” is based on an address
in reply to the reception of delegates at Cambridge. “A Student’s
Reminiscences of Huxley” was a lecture delivered at the Marine
Biological Laboratory of Wood’s Hole in the summer session of 1895. The
address on James Bryce was delivered at the memorial service to Viscount
Bryce at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, March 5, 1922. The
address on Joseph Leidy was originally delivered at the Joseph Leidy
Centenary, Philadelphia, December 6, 1923, and was later published in
Science. The article on Howard Crosby Butler was an address delivered at
the Graduate College of Princeton University, October 31, 1922. This
address was afterward published in the Butler memorial volume by the
Princeton University Press. The chapter on John Burroughs is an address
which was delivered at the John Burroughs memorial meeting, American
Academy of Arts and Letters, on November 18, 1921.

Other chapters of this book are based on articles published in the
following magazines: _Popular Science Monthly_, _Science_, _The
Century_, _The Sierra Club Bulletin_.

[Illustration:

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
]




                         ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
                               1823–1913

  I never had the pleasure of meeting Wallace, but I felt rewarded for
  the time I devoted to the study of his works and the influences which
  shaped his great career in preparing this Impression by his letter of
  acknowledgment, which is reproduced in facsimile. Wallace was a great
  man, although he was overshadowed by a much greater man, Darwin. The
  scientific relations of these two men were ideal; their magnanimity
  toward each other in the crisis of independent discovery of the great
  principle of Natural Selection is one of the noblest episodes in the
  history of biology.


                         ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

Nature and nurture conspire to form a naturalist. Predisposition, an
opportune period, and a happy series of events favored Alfred Russel
Wallace.

Wallace was the son of Thomas Vere Wallace, of Hanworth, Middlesex,
England, and Mary Anne Grennell, of Hertford. His ancestry is obscure.
On the paternal side he is probably descended from one of the branches
of Sir William Wallace, the popular national hero of Scotland, but
nothing is known back of his grandfather, who was probably keeper of the
inn on the estates of the Duke of St. Albans, of Hanworth. The burial
records of Hanworth mention an Admiral James Wallace. In his mother’s
family on the paternal side is the name Greenell, of Hertford, probably
the “Greenaile” in 1579, French Huguenot refugees after the massacre of
St. Bartholomew. Her grandfather was for many years alderman and twice
mayor of Hertford. One of the Greenells was an architect.

Wallace’s father took up the profession of the law, but did not
continue, and up to his marriage lived the life of a fairly well-to-do
middle-class gentleman. After his marriage he essayed the publishing of
two magazines apparently devoted to art, antiquities and general
literature, which were failures. He then moved from Marylebone to more
rural districts where living was less expensive, first to St. Georges,
Southwark, and then to Usk, Monmouthshire. In this village Alfred Russel
Wallace was born on January 8, 1823.

When Wallace was about six years of age the family moved to Hertford,
where his education was begun in the old grammar school that dated back
to 1617. He left school too young to begin Greek, but he studied Latin,
and next to Latin grammar the most painful subject he learned was
geography, principally because of the meaningless way in which it was
taught. During the last year of study at the grammar school, as the
family were then in very straitened circumstances, he assisted in the
teaching of the younger boys in reading, arithmetic, and writing.

Wallace considered that his home life in Hertford was in many ways more
educational than the time spent at school. His father was a man who
enjoyed the pleasure of literature and belonged to a book club through
which a constant stream of interesting books came to the house, from
which he read aloud to the family in the evenings. The father earned a
small income tutoring and as librarian of a small library, and the son
Alfred spent hours reading there, also.

At the age of thirteen young Wallace left school, with a view to
learning land surveying. He stayed in London a short time with his
brother John, who was apprenticed to a master builder, and their
evenings were most frequently spent in the “Hall of Science,” a kind of
mechanics institute for advanced thinkers among workmen. Here he heard
many lectures by Robert Owen, the founder of the socialist movement in
England, and took up philosophical reading, beginning with Paine’s “Age
of Reason,” among other books. In the summer of 1837 he went with his
brother William into Bedfordshire to begin his education as a land
surveyor, and practised for seven years in various parts of England and
Wales.

After a time it was decided that he should try to pursue the
clock-making business as well as surveying and general engineering, and
Wallace considered that this was the first of several turning-points in
his life, because changes in the business of the clock-making concern
with which he was connected at Leighton prevented his continuing this
work for more than a short period. He was delighted to take up again in
1839 the employment of land surveying because of the opportunities it
afforded for out-of-door life.

While at Neath, in Wales, there was not much demand for surveying, and
Wallace occupied himself in constructing a rude telescope with which he
was able to observe the moon and Jupiter’s satellites, and he developed
much interest in studying astronomy and in the development of
astronomical instruments. But he says that he was chiefly occupied with
what became more and more the solace and delight of his lonely rambles
among the moors and mountains, namely, his first introduction to the
variety, the beauty and the mystery of nature as manifested in the
vegetable kingdom.

His earnings were very meagre and he had little money for the purchase
of books. During the seven years he worked with his brother he says he
“hardly ever had more than a few shillings for personal expenses.” It
was during this period, while most occupied out of doors with the
observation and collection of plants, that he began to write down more
or less systematically his ideas on various subjects that interested
him. His first literary efforts all bear dates of the autumn and winter
of 1843, when he was between twenty and twenty-one years of age. One of
his first productions was the rough sketch of a popular lecture on
botany addressed to an audience supposed to be as ignorant as he was
when he began his observation of the native flowers. A second of these
early lectures was on the subject “The Advantages of Varied Knowledge,”
which he considered of interest chiefly as showing the bent of his mind
at the time and indicating a disposition for discursive reading and
study. He also wrote at this time on the manners and customs of the
Welsh peasantry in Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire, and put the matter
in form for one of the London magazines, but it was declined.

These early and serious studies in botany, continuing for four years,
prepared him for the plant wonders of the tropics. At the age of
twenty-one he went to London. He afterward regarded his difficulty in
obtaining employment as a great turning-point in his career, “for
otherwise,” he writes, “it seems very unlikely that I should ever have
undertaken what at that time seemed rather a wild scheme, a journey to
the almost unknown forests of the Amazon in order to observe nature and
make a living by collecting.”

In his autobiographic volumes of 1905, “My Life, a Record of Events and
Opinions,” there is also an interesting sketch of his state of mind at
this time.

  I do not think that at this formative period I could be said to have
  shown special superiority in any of the higher mental faculties, but I
  possessed a strong desire to know the causes of things, a great love
  of beauty in form and color, and a considerable, but not excessive
  desire for order and arrangement in whatever I had to do. If I had one
  distinct mental faculty more prominent than another it was the power
  of correct reasoning from a review of the known facts in any case to
  the causes or laws which produced them, and also in detecting
  fallacies in the reasoning of other persons.

Elsewhere in his autobiography he observes that whatever reputation in
science, literature and thought he may possess is the result of the
organs of comparison, causality and order, with firmness,
acquisitiveness, concentrativeness, constructiveness and wonder, all
above the average, but none of them excessively developed, combined with
a moderate faculty of language which

  enables me to express my ideas and conclusions in writing though but
  imperfectly in speech. I feel, myself, how curiously and persistently
  these faculties have acted in various combinations to determine my
  tastes, disposition and actions.

Wallace shared Darwin’s strong sentiment for justice as between man and
man, and abhorrence of tyranny and unnecessary interference with the
liberty of others. His retiring disposition enabled him to enjoy long
periods of reflection, receptiveness and solitude, both at home and in
the tropics, out of which have come the sudden illuminations or flashes
of light leading to the solution of the problems before him. As to this
wonderful mechanism of induction, Wallace observes:

  I have long since come to see that no one deserves either praise or
  blame for the _ideas_ that come to him, but only for the _actions_
  resulting therefrom. Ideas and beliefs are certainly not voluntary
  acts. They come to us—we hardly know _how_ or _whence_, and once they
  have got possession of us we can not reject or change them at will.

Apart from Darwin’s education in Christ’s College, Cambridge, as
compared with Wallace’s self-education, the parallel between his
intellectual tendencies and environment and those of Charles Darwin is
extraordinary. They enjoyed a similar current of influence from men,
from books and from nature. Thus the next turning-point in his life was
his meeting with Henry Walter Bates, through whom he acquired his zest
for the wonders of insect life, which opened for the first time for him
the zoological windows of nature. In a measure Bates was to Wallace what
the Reverend John S. Henslow had been to Darwin. It is noteworthy that
the greater and most original part of his direct observations of nature
was upon the adaptations of insects.

Darwin and Wallace fell under the spell of the same books, first and
foremost those of Lyell, as noted above, then of Humboldt in his
“Personal Narrative” (1814–18), of Robert Chambers in his “Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation” (1844), of Malthus in his “Essay on the
Principle of Population” (1798).

It was, however, Darwin’s own “Journal of Researches,” published in
1845, and read by Wallace at the age of twenty-three, which determined
him to invite Bates to accompany him on his journey to the Amazon and
Rio Negro, which filled the four years 1848–52. In this wondrous
equatorial expanse, like Darwin he was profoundly impressed with the
forests, the butterflies and birds, and with his first meeting with man
in an absolute state of nature. Bates, himself a naturalist of high
order,[2] was closely observing the mimetic resemblances among insects
to animate and inanimate objects and introducing Wallace to a field
which he subsequently made his own. Bates remained several years after
Wallace’s departure and published his classical memoir on mimicry in
1860–61. Wallace’s own description of his South American experiences,
entitled “Narrative of Travels on the Amazon,” published in 1853 when he
was thirty years of age, does not display the ability of his later
writings and shows that his powers were slowly developing.

His eight years of travel between 1854 and 1862 in the Indo-Malay
Islands, the Timor Group, Celebes, the Moluccas and the Papuan Group
brought his powers to full maturity. It is apparent that his prolonged
observations on the natives, the forests, the birds and mammals, and
especially on the butterflies and beetles, were gradually storing his
mind for one of those discharges of generalization which come so
unexpectedly out of the vast accumulation of facts. “The Malay
Archipelago” of 1869, published seven years after the return, is
Wallace’s “journal of researches,” that is, it is to be compared with
Darwin’s great work of this title. Its fine breadth of treatment in
anthropology, zoology, botany and physiography gives it a rank second
only to Darwin’s “Journal” in a class of works repeatedly enriched by
British naturalists from the time of Burchell’s journey in Africa.

Wallace’s first trial at the evolution problem was his essay sent to the
_Annals and Magazine of Natural History_ in 1855, entitled “On the Law
Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” This paper
suggested the _when_ and _where_ of the occurrence of new forms, but not
the _how_. He concludes:

  It has now been shown, though most briefly and imperfectly, how the
  law that “_Every species has come into existence coincident both in
  time and space with a preexisting closely allied species_,” connects
  together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and
  hitherto unexplained facts.

In February, 1858, during a period of intermittent fever at Ternate, the
_how_ arose in his mind with the recollection of the “Essay” of Malthus,
and there flashed upon him all the possible effects of the struggle for
existence. Twenty years before the same idea, under similar
circumstances, had come into the mind of Darwin. The parallel is
extraordinary as shown in the following citations:

               DARWIN                              WALLACE
 In October, 1838, that is, fifteen  In February, 1858, I was suffering
 months after I had begun my         from a rather severe attack of
 systematic inquiry, I happened to   intermittent fever at Ternate, in
 read for amusement, “Malthus on     the Moluccas; and one day, while
 Population,” and being well         lying on my bed during the cold
 prepared to appreciate the struggle fit, wrapped in blankets, though
 for existence which everywhere goes the thermometer was at 88° Fahr.,
 on from long-continued observations the problem again presented itself
 of the habits of animals and        to me, and something led me to
 plants, it at once struck me that   think of the “positive checks”
 under these circumstances favorable described by Malthus in his “Essay
 variations would tend to be         on Population,” a work I had read
 preserved, and unfavorable ones to  several years before, and which had
 be destroyed. _The result of this   made a deep and permanent
 would be the formation of new       impression on my mind. These
 species._ Here, then, I had at last checks—war, disease, famine and the
 got a theory by which to work; but  like—must, it occurred to me, act
 I was so anxious to avoid prejudice on animals as well as man. Then I
 that I determined not for some time thought of the enormously rapid
 to write even the briefest sketch   multiplication of animals, causing
 of it. In June, 1842, I first       these checks to be much more
 allowed myself the satisfaction of  effective in them than in the case
 writing a very brief abstract of my of man; and while pondering vaguely
 theory in pencil, in thirty-five    on this fact there suddenly flashed
 pages, and this was enlarged during upon me the _idea_ of the survival
 the summer of 1844 into one of 230  of the fittest—that the individuals
 pages.—Darwin’s “Autobiography,”    removed by these checks must be on
 Chap. II.                           the whole inferior to those that
                                     survived. In the two hours that
                                     elapsed before my ague fit was
                                     over, I had thought out almost the
                                     whole of the theory; and the same
                                     evening I sketched the draft of my
                                     paper, and in the two succeeding
                                     evenings wrote it out in full, and
                                     sent it by the next post to Mr.
                                     Darwin.—Wallace’s “My Life,” p.
                                     212.

Darwin had been working upon the verification of the same idea for
twenty years. We owe to Sir Joseph Hooker and to Lyell the bringing
together of these independent but strikingly similar manuscripts. The
noble episode which followed of the joint publication of the discovery
was prophetic of the continued care for truth and carelessness of self,
of the friendship, mutual admiration and co-operation between these two
high-minded men, which affords a golden example for our own and future
ages. Each loved his own creations, yet undervalued his own work; each
accorded enthusiastic praise to the work of the other.

It is a striking circumstance in the history of biology that Wallace’s
rapidly produced sketch of 1858 “On the Tendencies of Varieties to Part
Indefinitely from the Original Type” not only pursues a line of thought
parallel to that of Darwin, except in excluding the analogy of natural
with human selection, but embodies the permanent substance of the
selection theory as it is today after fifty-four years of world-wide
research. It may be regarded as his masterpiece. The attempt has been
made by De Vries and others to show that Wallace in his “Darwinism” of
1889 differed from Darwin on important points, but whatever may be true
of this final modification of the theory, a very careful comparison of
the Darwin-Wallace sketches of 1858 shows that they both involve the
principle of discontinuity; in fact, fluctuation in the sense of plus
and minus variation was not recognized at the time; the notion of
variation was that derived directly from field rather than from
laboratory notes. This is repeatedly implied in Wallace’s language and
especially in his sketch of 1858:

  ... there is a general principle in nature which will cause many
  _varieties_ to survive the parent species, and to give rise to
  successive variations departing further and further from the original
  type, and which also produces, in domesticated animals, the tendency
  of varieties to return to the parent form....

  Most or perhaps all the variations from the typical form of a species
  must have some definite effect, however slight, on the habits or
  capacities of the individuals. Even a change of color might, by
  rendering them more or less distinguishable, affect their safety; a
  greater or less development of hair might modify their habits.... The
  superior variety would then alone remain, and on a return to favorable
  circumstances would rapidly increase in numbers and occupy the place
  of the extinct species and variety.

  The _variety_ would now have replaced the _species_, of which it would
  be a more perfectly developed and more highly organized form.... Here,
  then, we have _progression and continued divergence_ deduced from the
  general laws which regulate the existence of animals in a state of
  nature, and from the undisputed fact that varieties do frequently
  occur.... Variations in unimportant parts might also occur, having no
  perceptible effect on the life-preserving powers; and the varieties so
  furnished might run a course parallel with the parent species, either
  giving rise to further variations or returning to the former type....
  In the wild animal, on the contrary, all its faculties and powers
  being brought into full action for the necessities of existence, any
  increase becomes immediately available, is strengthened by exercise,
  and must even slightly modify the food, the habits and the whole
  economy of the race. It creates, as it were, a new animal, one of
  superior powers, and which will necessarily increase in numbers and
  outlive those inferior to it....

  We see, then, that no inferences as to varieties in a state of nature
  can be deduced from the observation of those occurring among domestic
  animals.... Domestic animals are abnormal, irregular, artificial; they
  are subject to varieties which never occur and never can occur in a
  state of nature; their very existence depends altogether on human
  care.... An origin such as is here advocated will also agree with the
  peculiar character of the modifications of form and structure which
  obtain in organized beings—the many lines of divergence from a central
  type, the increasing efficiency and power of a particular organ
  through a succession of allied species, and the remarkable persistence
  of unimportant parts, such as color, texture of plumage and hair, form
  of horns or crests, through a series of species differing considerably
  in more essential characters.... This progression, by minute steps, in
  various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary
  conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it
  is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena....

It is true that Wallace subsequently modified his theory, adopted the
selection of plus and minus fluctuations, and became a determined
opponent of the mutation hypothesis of De Vries.

The distinctive features of the later development of the theory in
Wallace’s mind were his more implicit faith in selection, his insistence
on utility or selection value of new or varying characters, his flat
rejection of Lamarckism, his reliance on spontaneous variations as
supplying all the materials for selection. This confidence appears in
the following passages from his militant reply in the volume of 1889 to
the critics of Darwinism:

  The right or favorable variations are so frequently present that the
  unerring power of natural selection never wants materials to work
  upon.... Weismann’s theory ... adds greatly to the importance of
  natural selection as the one invariable and ever-present factor in all
  organic change and that which can alone have produced the temporary
  fixity combined with the secular modification of species.

The principle of discontinuity is less clearly brought out than in the
first sketch of 1858; the selection of fluctuation is favorably
considered. The laws and causes of variation are, however, assumed
rather than taken up as a subject of inquiry. These opinions of 1889
were the summation of twenty-nine years of work.

To return to the life-narrative, the autumn of 1860 found Wallace in the
Moluccas reading the “Origin of Species” through five or six times, each
time with increasing admiration. A letter of September 1 to his friend
George Silk contains the key to the subsequent direction of his
research, namely, his recognition of the vast breadth of Darwin’s
principles and his determination to devote his life to their exposition:

  I could _never have approached_ the completeness of his book, its vast
  accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, and its admirable
  tone and spirit. I really feel thankful that it has _not_ been left to
  me to give the theory to the world. Mr. Darwin has created a new
  science and a new philosophy; and I believe that never has such a
  complete illustration of a new branch of human knowledge been due to
  the labors and researches of a single man. Never have such vast masses
  of widely scattered and hitherto quite unconnected facts been combined
  into a system and brought to bear upon the establishment of such a
  grand and new and simple philosophy.

The discovery of “Natural Selection” again turned the course of
Wallace’s life. In his autobiography he writes:

  I had, in fact, been bitten with the passion for species and their
  description, and if neither Darwin nor myself had hit upon “natural
  selection,” I might have spent the best years of my life in this
  comparatively profitless work, but the new ideas swept all this
  away.... This outline of the paper will perhaps enable my readers to
  understand the intense interest I felt in working out all these
  strange phenomena, and showing how they could almost all be explained
  by that law of “Natural Selection” which Darwin had discovered many
  years before, and which I also had been so fortunate as to hit upon.

The coloring of animals as observed in the tropics and the Malayan
Islands was the subject in which Wallace made his most extensive and
original contributions to Darwinism. In his sketch of 1858 he wrote:

  Even the peculiar colors of many animals, especially insects, so
  closely resembling the soil or the leaves or the trunks on which they
  habitually reside, are explained on the same principle; for though in
  the course of ages varieties of many tints may have occurred, _yet
  those races having colors best adapted to concealment from their
  enemies would inevitably survive the longest_.

Returning from the Archipelago in 1862, he published in 1864 his pioneer
paper, “The Malayan Papilionidæ or Swallow-tailed Butterflies, as
illustrative of the Theory of Natural Selection,” in which he at once
took rank beside Bates and Müller as one of the great contributors to
the color characteristics of animals. We see him step by step developing
the ideas of protective resemblance which he had fully discussed with
Bates, of alluring and warning colors, and of mimicry, pointing out the
prevalence of mimicry in the female rather than in the male. The whole
series of phenomena is believed to depend upon the great principle of
the utility of every character, upon the need of color protection by
almost all animals, and upon the known fact that no characteristic is so
variable as color, that, therefore, concealment is most easily obtained
by color modification. Protective resemblance in all its manifold forms
has ever been dominant in his mind as a greater principle than that of
the sexual selection of color which Darwin favored.

Here may be cited Wallace’s own account of his famous observation of
mimicry in the leaf butterfly from his volume of 1869, “The Malay
Archipelago”:

  The other species to which I have to direct attention is the _Kallima
  paralekta_, a butterfly of the same family group as our Purple
  Emperor, and of about the same size or larger. Its upper surface is of
  a rich purple, variously tinged with ash color, and across the fore
  wings there is a broad bar of deep orange, so that when on the wing it
  is very conspicuous. This species was not uncommon in dry woods and
  thickets, and I often endeavored to capture it without success, for
  after flying a short distance it would enter a bush among dry or dead
  leaves, and however carefully I crept up to the spot I could never
  discover it till it would suddenly start out again and then disappear
  in a similar place. At length I was fortunate enough to see the exact
  spot where the butterfly settled, and though I lost sight of it for
  some time, I at length discovered that it was close before my eyes,
  but that in its position of repose it so closely resembled a dead leaf
  attached to a twig as almost certainly to deceive the eye even when
  gazing full upon it. I captured several specimens on the wing, and was
  able fully to understand the way in which this wonderful resemblance
  is produced.... All these varied details combine to produce a disguise
  that is so complete and marvellous as to astonish every one who
  observes it; and the habits of the insects are such as to utilize all
  these peculiarities, and render them available in such a manner as to
  remove all doubt of the purpose of this singular case of mimicry,
  which is undoubtedly a protection to the insect.

In 1867, in a manner which delighted Darwin, Wallace advanced his
provisional solution of the cause of the gay and even gaudy colors of
caterpillars as warnings of distastefulness. In 1868 he propounded his
explanation of the colors of nesting birds, that when both sexes are
conspicuously colored, the nest conceals the sitting bird, but when the
male is conspicuously colored and the nest is open to view, the female
is plainly colored and inconspicuous. His theory of recognition colors
as of importance in enabling the young birds and mammals to find their
parents was set forth in 1878, and he came to regard it as of very great
importance.

In “Tropical Nature” (1878) the whole subject of the colors of animals
in relation to natural and sexual selection is reviewed, and the general
principle is brought out that the exquisite beauty and variety of insect
colors has not been developed through their own visual perceptions, but
mainly and perhaps exclusively through those of the higher animals which
prey upon them. This conception of color origin, rather than that of the
general influence of solar light and heat or the special action of any
form of environment, leads him to his functional and biological
classification of the colors of living organisms into five groups, which
forms the foundation of the modern, more extensive and critical
classification of Poulton. He concluded (p. 172):

  We find, then, that neither the general influence of solar light and
  heat, nor the special action of variously tinted rays, are adequate
  causes for the wonderful variety, intensity and complexity of the
  colors that everywhere meet us in the animal and vegetable worlds. Let
  us, therefore, take a wider view of these colors, grouping them into
  classes determined by what we know of their actual uses or special
  relations to the habits of their possessors. This, which may be termed
  the functional and biological classification of the colors of living
  organisms, seems to be best expressed by a division into five groups,
  as follows:

 Animals.│1. Protective colors.
    „    │2. Warning colors.   │_a._ Of creatures specially protected.
    „    │          „          │_b._ Of defenseless creatures mimicking
         │                     │  _a_.
    „    │3. Sexual colors.
    „    │4. Typical colors.
 ────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Plants. │5. Attractive colors.

Twelve years later he devoted four chapters of his “Darwinism” to the
colors of animals and plants, still maintaining the hypotheses of
utility, of spontaneous variation and of selection.

The study of geographic distribution of animals also sprang from the
inspiration of the Malayan journey and from the suggestiveness of the
eleventh and twelfth chapters of “The Origin of Species,” which Wallace
determined to work out in an exhaustive manner. Following the
preliminary treatises of Buffon, of Cuvier and Forbes, and the early
regional classification of Sclater, Wallace takes rank as the founder of
the science of zoogeography in his two great works, “The Geographical
Distribution of Animals” of 1876, and “Island Life” of 1881, the latter
volume following the first as the result of four years of additional
thought and research. His early observations on insular distribution
were sketched out in his article of 1860, “The Zoological Geography of
the Malayan Archipelago.”

Here is his discovery of the Bali-Lombok boundary line between the
Indian and the Australian zoological regions which has since been
generally known by his name.

In these fundamental geologic and geographic works Wallace appears as a
disciple of Lyell in uniformitarianism, and a follower of Dana as
regards the stability and permanence of continental and oceanic areas,
for which doctrine he advances much original evidence. He taxes his
ingenuity to discover every possible means of dispersal of animals and
plants other than those which would be afforded by hypothetical land
connections; he considers every possible cause of extinction other than
those which are sudden or cataclysmal.

The “Island Life” is in itself a great contribution to zoology and
zoogeography, the starting-point of all modern discussion of insular
faunas and floras. His conservative theory of dispersal is applied in an
original way to explain the arctic element in the mountain regions of
the tropics, as opposed to the low-temperature theory of tropical
lowlands during the Glacial Period; his explanation is founded on known
facts as to the dispersal and distribution of plants and does not
require the extreme changes in the climate of tropical lowlands during
the Glacial Period on which Darwin founded his interpretation. The
causes and influence of the Glacial Epoch are discussed in an exposition
of Croll’s theory. In this connection may be mentioned one of Wallace’s
original geological contributions, in the article “Glacial Erosions of
Lake Basins,” published in 1893, namely, his theory of glacial erosion
as a means of explaining the origin of valley lakes of glaciated
countries.

The original trend of Wallace’s thought as to the ascent of man is first
shown in the three anthropological essays of 1864, 1869 and 1870, which
were subsequently collected in the volume “Contributions to the Theory
of Natural Selection.” This work, published in 1871, includes all his
original essays from 1855 to 1869 on selection, on color and human
evolution, which foreshadow the later development of his speculative
philosophy.

A suggestive anthropological contribution is the article entitled “The
Expressiveness of Speech or Mouth Gesture as a Factor in the Origin of
Language,” in which is developed the theory of the origin of language in
connection with the motions of the lips, jaws and tongue. With Wallace
also arose the now widely accepted belief that the Australian aborigines
constitute a low and perhaps primitive type of the Caucasian race.

In the article of 1864, “The Development of Human Races under the Law of
Natural Selection,” Wallace first advanced the hypothesis which has
since proved to be untenable, that so soon as man learned to use fire
and make tools, to grow food, to domesticate animals, to use clothing
and build houses, the action of natural selection was diverted from his
body to his mind, and thenceforth his physical form remained stable,
while his mental faculties improved. His subsequent papers on human
evolution, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man” of 1869,
“On Instinct in Man and Animals” of 1871, mark the gradual divergence of
his views from those of Darwin, for in his opinion natural selection is
believed to be inadequate to account for several of the physical as well
as psychical characteristics of man, for example his soft, sensitive
skin, his speech, his color sense, his mathematical, musical and moral
attributes. He concluded:

  The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is that a
  superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite
  direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the
  development of many animal and vegetable forms.

It is also prophetic of his later indictments of the so-called
civilization of our times that we find at the end of the closing pages
of “The Malay Archipelago” the first statement of the feeling which so
many travelers have experienced from a comparison of the natural and
so-called civilized condition of man that “social evolution from
barbarism to civilization” has not advanced general human welfare. These
humanitarian and partly socialistic ideas are developed in a series of
recurrent essays between 1882 and 1903, including “The Nationalization
of Land” and “Studies Scientific and Social.”

He returned to this subject in what we believe to be his last published
essay, namely, his “Social Environment and Moral Progress” of 1913,
wherein he considers the so-called “feministic” movement and future of
woman:

  The foregoing statement of the effect of established natural laws, if
  allowed free play under rational conditions of civilization, clearly
  indicates that the position of woman in the not distant future will be
  far higher and more important than any which has been claimed for or
  by her in the past.

  While she will be conceded full political and social rights on an
  equality with men, she will be placed in a position of responsibility
  and power which will render her his superior, since the future moral
  progress of the race will so largely depend upon her free choice in
  marriage. As time goes on, and she acquires more and more economic
  independence, _that_ alone will give her an effective choice which she
  has never had before. But this choice will be further strengthened by
  the fact that, with ever-increasing approach to equality of
  opportunity for every child born in our country, that terrible excess
  of male deaths, in boyhood and early manhood especially due to various
  preventable causes, will disappear, and change the present majority of
  women to a majority of men. This will lead to a greater rivalry for
  wives, and will give to women the power of rejecting all the lower
  types of character among their suitors.

  It will be their special duty so to mould public opinion, through home
  training and social influence, as to render the women of the future
  the regenerators of the entire human race.

In closing this review of a great life, we cannot refrain from
reflecting on the pendulum of scientific opinion. The discovery of a
great truth such as the law of selection is always followed by an
over-valuation, from which there is certain to be a reaction. We are in
the midst of such a reaction at the present time, in which the
Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection is less appreciated than it
will be in the future when there comes a fresh readjustment of
scientific values.

It is well to remember that we may not estimate either the man of
science or his conclusions as of our own period, but must project
ourselves in imagination into the beginnings of his thought and into the
travails of his mind, considering how much larger he was than the men
about him, how far he was an innovator, breaking away from the
traditions of his times, how far his direct observations apart from
theory are true and permanent, and how far his theories have contributed
to the great stream of biological thought.

Our perspective has covered a long, honorable span of sixty-five years
into the beginnings of the thinking life of a natural philosopher whose
last volume, “The World of Life,” of the year 1911, gives as clear a
portrayal of his final opinions as that which his first essay of 1858
portrays of his early opinions.

We follow the cycle of his reflection beginning with “adaptation” as the
great mystery to be solved; in the middle and sanguine period of life,
“adaptation” is regarded as fully explained by natural selection; in the
closing and conservative period of life “adaptation” is again regarded
in some of its phases as entirely beyond human powers of interpretation,
not only in the evolution of the mental and spiritual nature of man, but
in such marvellous manifestations as the scales of butterflies or the
wings of birds.

From our own intellectual experience we may sympathize with the rebound
of maturity from the buoyant confidence of the young man of thirty-five
who finds in natural selection the entire solution of the problem of
fitness which has vexed the mind and aroused the scientific curiosity of
man since the time of Empedocles. We have ourselves experienced a loss
of confidence with advancing years, an increasing humility in the face
of transformations which become more and more mysterious the more we
study them, although we may not join with this master in his appeal to
an organizing and directing supernatural principle. Younger men than
Wallace, both among the zoologists and philosophers of our own time, are
giving a somewhat similar metaphysical solution of the eternal problem
of adaptation, which still baffles and transcends our powers of
experiment and of reasoning.

[Illustration:

  _Photographed by his son, Leonard Darwin_

  CHARLES DARWIN
]




                             CHARLES DARWIN
                               1809–1882

  I met Darwin in Huxley’s laboratory and my impression of his
  personality is described in the address on the Life and Works of
  Darwin, which was delivered at Columbia University on the hundredth
  anniversary of his birth, as an introduction to a series of nine
  lectures on Charles Darwin and his influence in science. The fact that
  Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809,
  brought together these two great men, so widely different in their
  vocations, so similar in their reverence for the truth, in their
  simplicity and directness of life.

  The address at the Darwin Centenary at Cambridge was delivered at the
  request of my American colleagues, in reply to the reception of the
  delegates. It was strictly limited as to time, presenting the problem
  of speaking of Darwin to the men who knew him personally, who recalled
  almost every detail of his life—to sum up in comparatively few words
  the outstanding facts of his influence. The form of this address is
  therefore quite in contrast to the preceding tribute, which was
  without time limitation.


                        LIFE AND WORKS OF DARWIN


                                   I

Columbia University is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Darwin, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the
“Origin of Species.” In the year 1809 many illustrious men[3] were born,
among them Darwin and Lincoln, one hundred years ago today, February 12.
So widely different in their lives, Darwin and Lincoln were yet alike in
simplicity of character and of language, in love of truth, in abhorrence
of slavery, and especially in unconsciousness of their power. Both were
at a loss to understand their influence over other men. “I am nothing
and truth is everything,” once wrote Lincoln. In concluding his
autobiography Darwin wrote:

  With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that
  I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of
  scientific men on some important points. My success as a man of
  science has been determined as far as I can judge, by complex and
  diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most
  important have been the love of science, unbounded patience in long
  reflecting over any subject, industry in observing and collecting
  facts, a fair share of invention as well as of common sense.

Lincoln’s greatest single act was his death-blow to slavery. Man had
been fighting for centuries for freedom, in labor, in government, in
religion, and in mind. It is certainly notable that the final victory
for bodily liberty was won during the very years which witnessed the
final emancipation of the mind. I do not see that Darwin’s supreme
service to his fellow men was his demonstration of evolution—man could
have lived on quite as happily and perhaps more morally under the old
notion that he was specially made in the image of his Maker. Darwin’s
supreme service was that he won for man absolute freedom in the study of
the laws of nature; he literally fulfilled the saying of St. John, “Ye
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

When we look back upon the very recent years of 1858–59, the years of
revolution, we see that we were far from free either to study nature or
reason about it. Our intellectual chains were from the forges of
theology both catholic and protestant. The Bible was read as a
revelation of physical law rather than as an epic of righteousness and
spiritual law. Theology while in power was itself in a most critical
position, in a _cul-de-sac_ of antagonism to reason and common sense,
and this despite the warnings of Augustine and of Bacon. As early as the
fifth century the wise theologian of Numidia had said:

  Leave questions of the earth and the sky and the other elements of
  this world to reasoning and observation. Perceiving that you are as
  far from the truth as the east from the west the man of science will
  scarce restrain his laughter.

Similarly, the great founder of the inductive method observed:

  Do not excite the laughter of men of science through an absurd mixture
  of matters human and divine. Do not commit the consummate folly of
  building a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of
  Genesis or on the Book of Job.

It is difficult for the college student in this day of liberty, if not
of license, to realize that, in the words of Lowell:

  We breathe cheaply in the common air thoughts that great hearts once
  broke for.

When, in 1844, Darwin communicated to the botanist Hooker under promise
of secrecy his outline of evolution, he well knew the opprobrium it
would bring, for he subsequently added (1846):

  When my notes are published I shall fall infinitely low in the opinion
  of all _sound_ naturalists, so this is my prospect for the future.

From the borders of Poland in 1543, or just three centuries earlier,
Copernicus had published his “Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies” and
thus fired the first shot in a three hundred years’ war for freedom to
observe nature. In 1611 the telescope of Galileo demonstrated the truth
of the Copernican law that the earth moves around the sun; and the most
impressive object today in Florence is the model of the finger of this
great astronomer as he held it up before the examiners of the
Inquisition, with the words, “It still moves.”

As time advanced the prison gave way to the milder but effective weapons
of ostracism and loss of position. In biology Linnæus, Buffon, Lamarck,
St. Hilaire, in turn discovered the evidences of evolution, but felt the
penalty and either recanted or suffered loss of position. The cause of
supernaturalism had never seemed stronger than in 1857; the masterly
works of Paley and Whewell had appeared; the great series of Bridgewater
Treatises to demonstrate the wisdom and goodness of God in the special
creation of adaptations had just been closed; men of rare ability,
Cuvier, Owen, Lyell and Agassiz, were on the side of special creation;
yet at the very time this whole system of natural philosophy was rotten
at the foundation because it was not the work of free observation.

Where his great predecessors Buffon and Lamarck had failed, Darwin won
through his unparalleled genius as an observer and reasoner, through the
absolutely irresistible force of the facts he had assembled and through
the simplicity of his presentation. Lacking the literary graces of his
grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and the obscurity of Spencer, Darwin was
understood by every one as every one could understand Lincoln. It is
true the cause was immediately championed by able men, but victory was
gained not by the vehement and radical Haeckel nor yet by the masterly
fighter Huxley, but through the resistless power of the truth as Darwin
saw it and presented it. It was not a denial, as had been the great
sceptical movement of the end of the eighteenth century, but an
affirmation. Darwin was not destroying but building; yet at the time
good and honest men trembled as if passing through an earthquake, for in
the whole history of human thought there had been no such cataclysm.


                                   II

In what he achieved Darwin is so entirely alone that his place in the
history of ideas is next to Aristotle, the great Greek biologist and
philosopher who preceded him by over two thousand years.

The biographers of Lincoln are at a loss to explain his greatness
through heredity. Darwin belonged to an able family, and his ancestors
are singularly prophetic of his career. He was near of kin to Francis
Galton, who shares with Weismann the leadership in the study of heredity
during the nineteenth century. By a happy combination of all the best
traits of the best of his ancestors coupled with the no less happy
omission of other traits, Darwin was a far greater man than any of his
forebears. Kindliness, truthfulness and love of nature were part of his
birthright. From his grandfather Erasmus, Charles may have inherited
especially his vividness of imagination and his strong tendency to
generalize. Countless hypotheses flitted through his mind. “Without
speculation there is no good and original observation,” he wrote to
Wallace. Still more interesting is the fact that the inheritance of his
grandfather’s tendency toward speculation took the direction of
evolution, for before the close of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin
gave the world in poetical form his belief in a complete evolutionary
system as well as the first clear exposition of what is now known as the
Lamarckian hypothesis. But in the grandson hypotheses were constantly
held in check by the determination to put each to the severe test of
observation. Darwin speaks of his father, Robert, as the most acute
observer he ever saw, and attributes to him his intense desire to
understand the reasons of things; from him came caution and
conservatism. He says in his “Autobiography”:

  I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any
  hypothesis (however much beloved), and I cannot resist forming one on
  every subject, as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

If the “poet is born not made,” the man of science is surely both born
and made. Rare as was Darwin’s genius, it was not more rare than the
wonderful succession of outward events which shaped his life. It is true
that Darwin believed with his cousin Francis Galton that education and
environment produce only a small effect upon the mind of any one, but
Darwin underestimated the force of his educational advantages just as he
underestimated his own powers, and this because he thought only of his
book and classroom life at school, at Edinburgh and at Cambridge, and
not of his broader life. It was true in 1817, as today, that few
teachers teach and few educators educate. It is true that those were the
dull days of classical and mathematical drill. Yet look at the roster of
Cambridge and see the men it produced. From Darwin’s regular college
work he may have gained but little, yet he was all the while enjoying an
exceptional training. Step by step he was made a strong man by a mental
guidance which is without parallel, by the precepts and example of his
father, for whom he held the greatest reverence, by his reading of the
poetry of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Milton, and the
scientific prose of Paley, Herschel and Humboldt, by the subtle
scholarly influences of old Cambridge, by the scientific inspiration and
advice of Henslow, by the masterful inductive influence of the geologist
Lyell, and by the great nature panorama of the voyage of the _Beagle_.

The college mates of Darwin saw more truly than he himself what the old
university was doing for him. Professor Poulton of Oxford believes that
the kind of life which so favored Darwin’s mind has largely disappeared
in English universities, especially under the sharp system of
competitive examinations; yet this is still more truly the atmosphere of
old Cambridge today than of any of our American colleges. It would be an
interesting subject to debate whether we could nurture such a man;
whether a Darwin, were he entered at a Columbia, a Harvard, a Princeton,
could develop mentally as Charles Darwin did at Cambridge in 1828. I
believe that conditions for the favorable nurture of such a mind are not
with us. They are repose, time for continuous thought, respect for the
man of brains and of individuality and of such peculiar tastes as Darwin
displayed in his avidity for collecting beetles, freedom from mental
convention, general sympathy for nature, and, above all, ardor in the
world of ideas. If the genial mind cannot find the kindred mind it
cannot develop. Many American school and college men are laughed out of
the finest promptings of their natures. In short, I believe our
intellectual environment would be distinctly against a young Darwin
today.

Thus event after event in Darwin’s life was singularly propitious. None
but a Darwin would have reflected these events as he did, but grand and
rare they certainly were.

At the age of nineteen he entered Christ’s of Cambridge, the small
college which two hundred years before had sheltered John Milton, the
great poet of “Paradise Lost,” the epic of the special creation theory
which it was Darwin’s destiny to destroy. His passion for sport,
shooting, hunting, cross-country riding, his genial enjoyment of friends
of his own age, did not prevent delightful excursions with older men. He
was known as “the man who walks with Henslow”; and close personal
intercourse with this learned and genial botanist (Reverend Wm. C.
Henslow) affected him more than any other feature of his college life.
After graduation this personal association extended through Henslow to
the geologist Sedgwick, who prepared him for the next step in his
career. It was Henslow who secured for him his place on the exploring
ship _Beagle_ and the voyage round the world (1831–1836), by far the
most important experience in his life.

No graduate course in any university can compare for a moment with the
glorious vision which passed before young Darwin on the _Beagle_, but
here again fortune smiled upon him, for this vision required the very
scientific spirit and point of view which came to him through the
reading of the “Principles of Geology” of Lyell, the masterly teacher of
the uniformitarian doctrine of Hutton. That nature worked slowly in past
as in present time and that the interpretation of the past is through
observation of the present gave the note of Darwin’s larger and more
original interpretation, because the slow evolution which Lyell piously
restricted to geology and the surface of the earth Darwin extended to
biology and all living beings. If during the voyage Lyell’s arguments
convinced Darwin of the permanence of species, Lyell’s way of looking at
nature also gave him the means of seeing that species are not permanent.
In his own words, he “saw through Lyell’s eyes,” and with the admiration
of others always so characteristic of him his tribute to Lyell is
without reserve. The second edition of “The Journal” is dedicated:

  With grateful pleasure as an acknowledgment that the chief part of
  whatever scientific merit this Journal and the other works of the
  author may possess has been derived from studying the well-known and
  admirable “Principles of Geology.”

The five years of the voyage filled the twenty-second to twenty-seventh
years of Darwin’s life, the period now ordinarily given to professional
studies. In reading the simple but fascinating “Journal,” which stands
quite by itself in literature, we see how Darwin through his own genius
and through the methods successively impressed upon him by his father,
by Henslow, by Sedgwick and by Lyell was unconsciously preparing his
mind for the “Origin of Species” and the “Descent of Man,” the two most
influential books of science which have ever appeared. From the islands
of the Atlantic and the Pacific we follow his delightful comments on
animals and plants of all kinds on sea and land, through forests, pampas
and steppes, up the dry slopes of the Andes, along the salt lakes and
deserts of Chili and of Australia. The dense forests of Brazil, pendant
with orchids and gay with butterflies, contrast with those of Terra del
Fuego and of Tahiti, and with the deforested Cape de Verde Islands. On
these islands, the first he visits, he is enormously impressed by the
superiority of Lyell’s method. He visits other islands of all kinds,
inhabited and uninhabited, the non-volcanic St. Paul’s rocks,
half-submerged volcanic cones, coral reefs and islands of the south
Pacific. He observes live glaciers, as well as the contrasting action of
active and of dead volcanoes. Along the rivers of Patagonia he unearths
great extinct or fossil mammals; in Peru he studies the extinct races of
man; the aborigines of Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia make the most
profound impression upon his mind. In brief, he sees the great drama of
nature in all its lesser scenes and in all its grander acts. He begins
the voyage a firm believer in the fixity of species, but doubts begin to
enter his mind when in the sands of the pampas of South America he
perceives that the extinct forms are partly ancestral to the living, and
when on the isolated Galapagos Islands he finds the life is not that of
a special creation but that detached from the continent of South America
six hundred miles distant.

Darwin says:

  I owe to the voyage the first real training and education of my mind.
  That my mind had developed is rendered probable by my father’s first
  exclamation on my return, “why the shape of his head is quite
  altered.”


                                  III

Soon after Darwin’s return he moved to London for the two most active
years of his life, to care for his collections and to write up his
observations. At this moment came the third of the great turning-points
in his life, which as a mysteriously disguised blessing was brought
about through ill health. In London he was entering official duties and
public scientific service which would undoubtedly have increased and
interfered more and more seriously with his work. We can only count it
as one of the most fortunate circumstances in the history of science
that Darwin at the age of thirty-three was forced to leave London and to
move to Down. Here for forty years he never knew for one day the health
of an ordinary man; his life was one long struggle against the strain of
sickness. But unrealized by him there was the compensation of a mind
undisturbed by the constant interruption of outside affairs, such
interruption as killed Huxley and is killing so many fine and ambitious
men today. When I saw Huxley and Darwin side by side in 1879, the one
only fifty-four, the other seventy, the younger man looked by far the
more careworn of the two. Huxley, the strong man, broke down mentally at
fifty-six; Darwin, the invalid, was vigorous mentally at seventy-two.

Darwin’s writings fall into three grand series. In the nine years after
he returned from the voyage, or between his twenty-seventh and
thirty-sixth years, Darwin wrote the first series, including his
pre-evolutionary geological and zoological works, his “Coral Reefs”
(1842), his “Zoology and Geology of the Voyage of the _Beagle_”
(1844–1846), his “Journal of Researches,” the popular narrative of his
voyage (1845). Darwin’s ill health thereafter shut him off from geology,
although his last volume, “The Earthworm,” was in a sense geological.

It is characteristic of the life of every great man that his genius and
his own self-analysis instinctively guide him to discover his mental
needs.

Until the age of forty-five Darwin in his own opinion had not completed
his education, in the sense that education is a broad and exact
training. He now proceeded to fill the one gap in his training by
devoting the eight years of his life between thirty-seven and forty-five
to a most laborious research upon the barnacles, or Cirripedia. This
gave him the key to the principles of the natural or adaptively
branching and divergent arrangement of animals through the laws of
descent as set forth in the “Origin,” which he certainly could not have
secured in any other way. The value he placed on his work on the
barnacles is of especial import today when systematic work is so lightly
esteemed by many biologists, young and old. Darwin subsequently, in the
words of Hooker, “recognized three stages in his career as a biologist,
the mere collector at Cambridge, the collector and observer on the
_Beagle_ and for some years afterwards, and the trained naturalist
after, and only after, the Cirripede work.”

Long before this, however, at the age of twenty-eight, Darwin had begun
his career as a Darwinian. In July, 1837, he began his notes on the
transmutation of species, based on purely Baconian principles, on the
rigid collection of facts which would bear in any way on the variations
of animals and plants under domestication and in nature. Rare as was his
reasoning power, his powers of observation were of a still more distinct
order. He persistently and doggedly followed every clew; he noticed
little things which escaped others; he always noted exceptions and at
once jotted down facts opposed to his theories. On the voyage the
marvellous adaptations of animals and plants had been his greatest
puzzle. Fifteen months later, in October, 1838, in reading the work of
Malthus, on “Population,” there flashed across his mind the threefold
clew of the struggle for existence, of constant variability, and of the
selection of variations which happen to be adaptive.

The three memorable features of Darwin’s greatest work, “The Origin of
Species,” are, that he was twenty-one years in preparing it, that,
although by 1844 he was a strongly convinced evolutionist and natural
selectionist, he kept on with his observations for fifteen years, and
the volume even then would have been still longer postponed but for a
wonderful coincidence, which constitutes the third and not the least
memorable feature. This coincidence was that Wallace had also become an
evolutionist and had also discovered the principle of natural selection
through the reading of the same essay of Malthus. It is further
remarkable that of all persons Wallace selected Darwin as the one to
whom to send his paper. It was then through the persuasion of the great
botanist Hooker, who had known Darwin’s views for thirteen years, that
these independent discoveries were published jointly on July 1, 1858.
All the finest points of Darwin’s personal character were displayed at
this time; in fact, the entire Darwin-Wallace history up to and
including Wallace’s noble and self-depreciatory tribute to Darwin on
July 1 of last summer, is one of the brightest chapters in the history
of science. Wallace himself pointed out the very important distinction
that while the theories contained in the two papers published fifty
years ago were nearly identical, Wallace had deliberated only three days
after coming across the passage in Malthus, while Darwin had deliberated
for fifteen years. He modestly declared that the respective credit
should be in the ratio of fifteen years to three days.

Several months past the age of fifty Darwin published his epoch-making
work (November, 1859), and despite ill health, between fifty and
seventy-three he produced the nine great volumes which expand and
illustrate the views expressed in “The Origin of Species.”

A parallel to this remarkable late productiveness is that of Kant, who
also put forth his greatest work after fifty. Let those past the five
decades take heart, for it appears that while there are inborn
differences between men in this regard, imagination, observation,
reasoning and production do not necessarily dim with age. Darwin’s mind
remained young and plastic to the end; his latest and one of his most
characteristic works, “The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the
Action of Earth Worms,” was published at the age of seventy-two, after
forty-four years of observation. It contained another and perhaps the
most extreme demonstration of Lyell’s principle that vast changes in
nature are brought about by the slow operation of infinitesimal causes.

Three of Darwin’s succeeding volumes are a filling out of the “Origin.”
“The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication” (two volumes,
1868) presents the entire fabric of the notes begun twenty-one years
before on the transmutation of species. “The Descent of Man” (1871) was
another logical outcome of the “Origin,” yet it was only faintly
adumbrated by a single allusion in that work to the fact that the
transmutation of species necessarily led to the evolution of man. The
“Descent” marks the third of the great dates in the history of thought,
as the “Origin” marks the second, because it is the final step in the
development of ideas which began with Copernicus in 1543. The world-wide
sensation, the mighty _storm_ produced by this bold climax of Darwin’s
work, is so fresh in the memory of all that a mere allusion suffices.
The evolutionary or genetic basis for modern psychology as stated in
“The Descent of Man” was given still more concrete form in Darwin’s
succeeding and most delightful volume, “The Expression of the Emotions”
(1872).

The knowledge of zoology and anatomy displayed in these four
evolutionary volumes came from direct observation, vast and systematic
reading and note-taking from the simple materials which Darwin could
collect at Down. Always penetrating as these observations are, they are
still, in my opinion, surpassed in beauty and ingenuity by his
marvellous work on plants, published between 1862 and 1880. Here the
principles of co-adaptation of plants and insects in cross- and
self-fertilization, in climbing plants and insectivorous plants, in
forms of flowers, in movements of plants, are all brought forth in
support of the theory of natural selection and the operation of unknown
laws. Darwin’s most precise observations and some of his most brilliant
discoveries recorded in these volumes laid the foundations of modern
experimental botany.

Of his method Darwin writes:

  From my early youth I had the strongest desire to understand or
  explain whatever I observed, that is, to group facts under some
  general laws. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for
  grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

The only work which Darwin wrote deductively was his “Coral Reefs.”
Every other volume came through the inductive-deductive process, that
is, through an early assemblage of facts followed by a series of trial
hypotheses, each of which was rigidly tested by additional facts. The
most central of these trial hypotheses was that of the building up of
adaptations through the selection of the single adaptive variation out
of the many fortuitous variations, and this Darwin was unable to rigidly
test by facts but was obliged to leave for verification or disproof by
work after him.


                                   IV

On December 8, 1879, when Darwin was in his seventieth year and I in my
twenty-second, I had the rare privilege of meeting him and looking
steadily in his face during a few moments’ conversation. It was in
Huxley’s laboratory, and I was at the time working upon the anatomy of
the Crustacea. The entry in my journal is as follows:

  This is a red letter day for me. As I was leaning over my lobster
  (_Homarus vulgaris_) this morning, cutting away at the brain, I raised
  my head and looked up to see Huxley and Darwin passing by me. I
  believe I never shall see two such great naturalists together again. I
  went on apparently with skill, really hacking my brain away, and cast
  an occasional glance at the great old gray-haired man. I was startled,
  so unexpected was it, by Huxley speaking to me and introducing me to
  Darwin as “an American who has already done some good palæontological
  work on the other side of the water.” I gave Darwin’s hand a
  tremendous squeeze (for I never shall shake it again) and said,
  without intending, in an almost reverential tone, “I am very glad to
  meet you.” He stands much taller than Huxley, has a very ruddy face,
  with benevolent blue eyes and overhanging eyebrows. His beard is quite
  long and perfectly white and his hair falls partly over a low
  forehead. His features are not good. My general impression of his face
  is very pleasant. He smiled broadly, said something about a hope that
  Marsh with his students would not be hindered in his work, and Huxley,
  saying “I must not let you talk too much,” hurried him on into the
  next room.

I may add, as distinctly recorded in my memory, that the impression of
Darwin’s bluish-gray eyes, deep-set under the overhanging brows, was
that they were the eyes of a man who could survey all nature.

Another memory of interest is that the instant Huxley closed the door I
was mobbed as the “lucky American” by the ninety less fortunate students
of Great Britain and other countries.

Huxley’s solicitude for Darwin’s strength was characteristic of him. He
often alluded to himself as “Darwin’s bull dog.”

I have already stated that of the two men Darwin gave the impression of
enjoying the better health. Huxley was then sixteen years the younger,
yet the burdens and strain of London life made him look less young and
hale. In this connection an earlier jotting from the same laboratory is
as follows:

  Huxley comes in as the clock strikes and begins to lecture at once,
  almost before it ceases. He looks old and somewhat broken, his eyes
  deeply sunken, but is a lecturer as strong as he ever could have been.
  His language is very simple too.


                                   V

Darwin passed away in the year 1882, at the age of seventy-three. Out of
the simple and quiet life at Down he had sent forth the great upheaval
and revolution.

On this centenary when we are honoring Darwin, many may ask, exactly
what is Darwinism? Failure to know leads some to doubt, others to
predict a decline, especially where “the wish is father to the thought.”
Nothing could be less true than to say that there is the least abatement
in the force of the main teaching of this great leader, namely, of the
evolutionary law of the universe. The vitality of this idea is shown by
its invasion of the physical world. Again, Darwinism is the sum of
Darwin’s observations on earth structure, on plants, animals and man.
This vast body of truth and of interpretation still so far surpasses
that brought forward by any other observer of nature, and these facts
and interpretations are so far confirmed that they have become the very
foundation-stones of modern biology and geology. Finally, looking at
Darwinism as the sum of his generalizations as to the processes of
evolution we again find a vast body of well-established laws which are
also daily becoming more evident. As to the laws of evolution, there is
no single biological principle more absolutely proved by the study of
living and extinct things since Darwin’s time than the broad law of
natural selection: certainly the fittest survive and reproduce their
kind, the fittest of every degree, all classes, orders, genera, species,
individuals and even the fittest organs and fittest separate parts of
organs. Darwin still gives us the only explanation which has ever been
suggested of hundreds of thousands of adaptations of which neither
Buffon’s view of direct effect of environment nor Lamarck’s view of the
inheritance of bodily modifications even approaches an explanation
worthy to be considered. Take the egg of the murre or guillemot, which
is so much larger at one end than the other that it cannot roll off the
cliff on which it is laid, or the seasonal changes of color in the
ptarmigan, every one of which is protective.

There is some lack of perspective, some egotism, much one-sidedness in
modern criticism. The very announcement, “Darwin deposed,” attracts such
attention as would the notice “Mt. Blanc removed”; does it not bespeak
courage to attack a lion even when deceased? Preoccupation in the study
of one great law, as in the case of Bateson on Mendelism and De Vries on
Mutation, blinds to every other law. To be dispassionate, let us
remember that Darwin’s hypothesis was framed in 1838, seventy-one years
ago. Are the two great Cambridge men, Newton and Darwin, lesser men
because astronomy and biology are progressive sciences? Secondly, to
know your Darwin you must not judge him by single passages but by all he
wrote. Darwin is not to be known through the extremes of those of his
followers with whom an hypothesis has become a creed. Reading him afresh
and through and through we discover that his “variation” and
“variability” are very broad and elastic terms. Every actual example he
cites of his main hypothesis, such as the speed of the wolf or the deer,
or the long neck of the giraffe, is a variation both heritable and of
adaptive value.

When we put together all the concrete cases which he gave to illustrate
his views of selection we see that he includes both continuous and
discontinuous variations, both the shades of difference of kind and
proportion and the little leaps or saltations from character to
character. For example, certain cases of immunity to disease are now
known to be “unit characters” in Bateson’s sense, or “mutants” in the De
Vries sense. Darwin repeatedly referred to immunity as a variation which
would be preserved by selection. Moreover, Darwin’s own repeated
assertion of his profound ignorance of the laws of variation certainly
pointed the way to the investigation of these laws, and it is this very
study which is modifying the applications of his selection hypothesis.

From first to last Huxley maintained that it would require many years of
study before naturalists could say whether Darwin had been led to
overestimate the power of natural selection. Darwin’s mind from first to
last was also open on this point. Through every edition of the “Origin”
we find the passage:

  The laws governing the incipient or primordial variations (unimportant
  except as the groundwork for selection to act on and then all
  important) I shall discuss under several heads. But I can come, as you
  may well believe, to only very partial and imperfect conclusions.

In 1869 and in the latest edition of the “Origin” Darwin speaks of
“individual differences” as of paramount importance, but he illustrates
these differences by such instances as the selection of passenger
pigeons with more powerful wings, or the selection of the lightest
colored birds in deserts.

There can be no question, however, that Darwin did love his selection
theory and somewhat overestimated its importance. His conception of
selection in nature may be compared to a series of concentric circles
constantly narrowing from the largest groups down to the minutest
structures. In the operations of this intimate circle of minute
variations within organisms he was inclined to believe two things:
first, that the fit or adaptive always arises out of the accidental, or
that out of large and minute variations _without direction_ selection
brings direction and fitness; second, as a consistent pupil of Lyell, he
was inclined to believe that the chief changes in evolution are slow and
continuous.

The psychology of Darwin was in a reaction state from the prevailing
false teleology; he was not expecting that purposive or teleological or
even orthogenetic laws of variation would be discovered. William James
has thus recently expressed and endorsed the spirit of Darwinism as a
new natural philosophy in the following words:

  It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the
  force of this argument [that is, the teleological], to see how little
  it counts for since the triumph of the Darwinian theory. Darwin opened
  our minds to the power of the chance-happenings to bring forth “fit”
  results if only they have time to add themselves together. He showed
  the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed
  because of their unfitness.

The question before us naturalists today is whether this
non-teleological spirit of Darwinism as expressed by William James
corresponds with the actual order of evolution in nature. This really
involves the deep-seated query whether the intimate or minute parts of
living things are operating under natural laws like non-living things or
are really lawless.

Before expressing my individual opinion based on my own researches of
the last twenty years I may summarize the general modern dissent: in
_three points_ it may be said that Darwin’s teachings are not accepted
today.

First, his slowly developed belief in the inheritance of bodily
modifications and the provisional “assemblage theory” of heredity which
he called _pangenesis_ has been set aside for Weismann’s law that
heredity lies in the continuity of a specific heredity plasm, and for
want of evidence of the transmission of acquired characters.

Second, while his prevailing belief that changes in organisms are in the
main slow and continuous is now positively demonstrated to be correct by
the study of descent in fossil organisms, there is also positive
evidence for the belief which he less strongly entertained that many
changes are discontinuous or mutative, as held by Bateson and De Vries.

Finally, his belief that out of fortuitous or undirected variations in
minute characters arise direction, purpose and adaptation through
selection still lacks proof by either observation or experiment. Fossil
and other descent series entirely unknown in Darwin’s time prove beyond
question that law rather than chance is prevailing in variation.

What the nature of these laws is it is still too early to say.
Personally I am strongly of the opinion that the laws of life, like the
ultimate laws of physics, may eventually prove to be beyond analysis.

To allow myself just one flight of fanciful statement drawn from
personal observation and reflection I may say there is a likeness
between the unit forces working in a single organism, both as revealed
by the microscope and in fossil series, and the individual soldiers
composing a giant army. The millions of well-ordered activities in the
body correspond with the millions of intelligently trained men who
compose the army; the selection process or the survival of the fittest
is like the competition between two armies, between the Russian and
Japanese, for example. It is an outward and visible competition between
two internally prepared and well-ordered hosts of units and groups of
units. Selection is continuously working upon the army as a whole and
also upon every unit which affects survival—an immunity unit, an
intelligence unit, a speed unit, a color or group of color units; just
as in the army it is working upon units of courage, of strategy, of
precision of fire, of endurance, of mass. In this sense it is perfectly
true to say with Darwin “that selection works upon certain single
variations.” It is not true, or at least it is not shown, that these
variations are a matter of chance; they rather appear to be a matter of
law, as indeed Darwin foresaw when he stated that he used the word
“chance” merely as a synonym of “ignorance.”

In the present state of biology we are studying the behavior of the
thousands of parts, sometimes of blending, sometimes of separate,
sometimes of paired or triplicate units, which compose the whole and
make up the individual organism. Natural selection determines which
organism shall win; more than this, it determines which serviceable
activities of each organism shall win. Here lie the limits of its power.
Selection is not a creative but a judicial principle. It is one of
Darwin’s many triumphs that he positively demonstrated that this
judicial principle is one of the great factors of evolution. Then he
clearly set our task before us in pointing out that the _unknown_ lies
in the laws of variation, and a stupendous task it is. At the same time
he left us a legacy in his inductive and experimental methods by which
we may blaze our trail.

Therefore, in this anniversary year, we do not see any decline in the
force of Darwinism but rather a renewed stimulus to progressive search.
As Huxley says:

  But this one thing is perfectly certain—that is, it is only by
  pursuing his method, by that wonderful single-mindedness, devotion to
  truth, readiness to sacrifice all things for the advance of definite
  knowledge, that we can hope to come any nearer than we are at present
  to the truths which he struggled to attain.


                   THE DARWIN CENTENARY AT CAMBRIDGE

Crossing the Atlantic in honor of Darwin and rejoicing in the privilege
of uniting in this celebration of his birth, we desire, first of all, to
render our tribute to the University of Cambridge....

What can we add to the chorus of appreciation of the great pupil of
Christ’s which has come from college, press and pulpit since the opening
of this anniversary year? Only a few words of _personal impression_.

To us, Darwin, more perhaps than any other naturalist, seems greatest in
the union of a high order of genius with rare simplicity and
transparency of thought. Dwelling on this lucid quality and on the vast
range of his observation from the most minute to the grandest relations
in nature, does not the image arise of a perfected optical instrument in
which all personal equation, aberration and refraction are eliminated
and through which, as it were, we gaze with a new vision into the
marvellous forms and processes of the living world? With this wondrous
lens our countrymen, Cope and Marsh, penetrated far deeper into fossil
life than their predecessor Joseph Leidy, and the arid deserts of the
Rocky Mountain region gave up their petrified dead as proofs of
Darwinism. Through its new powers Hyatt, Morse, Packard and Brooks saw
far more than their master Louis Agassiz and drew fresh testimonies of
development from the historic waters of New England. From the very end
of the new world, where the youthful Darwin received his first
impressions of the mutability of the forms of life, we enjoy a clearer
vision of the ancient life of Patagonia.

What of Darwin’s future influence?

While it is doubtful if human speculation about life can ever again be
so tangential as in our pre-Darwinian past of fifty years ago, it is
probable, in fact it is daily becoming more evident, that the destiny of
speculation is less the tangent than the maze—the maze of innumerable
lesser principles, with as many prophets calling to us to seek this
turning or that. There are those who in loyal advocacy of his system
feel that we shall not get much nearer to life than Darwin did, but this
is to abandon his progressive leadership, for if ever a master defined
the unknown and pointed the way of investigation, certainly it was
Darwin. In the wonderful round of addresses in his honor of this
Centennial Year and in the renewed critical study of his life and
writings, the recognition that Darwin opened the way has come to many
with the force of a fresh discovery. It is true that he left a system
and that he loved it as his own, but his forceful, self-unsparing and
suggestive criticism show that if he were living in these days of
Waagen, of Weismann, of Mendel and of De Vries, he would be in the front
line of inquiry, armed with matchless assemblage of fact, with
experiment and verification, and not least with incomparable candor and
good will. This bequest of a noble method is hardly less precious than
the immortal content of the “Origin of Species” itself.

[Illustration:

  _From a photograph copyright by Elliott and Fry_

  THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
]




                          THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
                               1825–1895

  To the memory of Balfour and of Huxley, my chief teacher in
  comparative anatomy, I dedicated my work, “The Age of Mammals.” Huxley
  set forth the logic of Darwin as applied to palæontology. Only a few
  men of the last century had the gift of speaking in clear language
  both to the learned and unlearned, and the greatest of these was
  Huxley. To write both for the man of one’s own profession and for the
  layman, to be accurate and abreast of the specialist who knows a
  subject as well as or better than you do, while intelligible to the
  non-specialist—there is the difficulty. Many times have I thought how
  simple it would be to address either audience separately. Yet I
  consider it fortunate that both are with us, because I share Huxley’s
  confidence in addressing those who are willing to do a little serious
  thinking in order to enjoy the vast vistas of interesting truth which
  come as the reward of effort. I share also his conviction that it is
  the duty of the man of science to devote a certain part of his time,
  however absorbed in research he may be, to an honest attempt to
  scatter scientific truth.

  During the winter of 1879–80 I attended Huxley’s full course of
  lectures on Comparative Anatomy and Evolution, which were delivered in
  the upper floor of the Royal College of Science. In “A Student’s
  Reminiscences of Huxley” I especially attempt to describe personal
  impressions which he made upon me as a lecturer and as a thinker and
  to record some of the flashes of wit with which he enlivened his
  lectures. Although intensely occupied at the time with a variety of
  public education matters and with the pressure of literary and
  scientific work, Huxley found time, chiefly in his home, to enter into
  conversation on the subjects flooding his mind. It was there that I
  heard some of the best stories here recorded.


                  A STUDENT’S REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY

By far the larger number of American students who go abroad pass through
the English Channel, obtain a distant view of the mother country and,
after from one to three years in Germany, return with an exclusively
German education. Neither England nor France having been visited, the
implication is that the countries which produced Owen, Darwin, Huxley
and Balfour, or Lamarck, Cuvier, St. Hilaire and Pasteur have nothing to
offer the American student. This is not the fact; the fact is that
England and France are a half-century behind Germany in that kind of
university organization which attracts a foreign student and enables him
immediately to find his level and enter upon his research. English and
French universities until a very recent date either have been not so
fully prepared or have met the newcomer with practically insuperable
obstacles in the matter of a degree.

None the less, the student who has not breasted these obstacles for the
compensating advantages which the English and French schools offer has
made a serious mistake. He has brought back not an Old World education,
but an exclusively German education, with its splendidly sound and
unique features and with many inherent defects. Germany produces the
generals and the rank and file of the armies of science, but certainly
the commanders-in-chief, in biology at least, have been Englishmen. If
we find the highest exponents of purely inductive research in Germany,
we certainly find a better union of the inductive and deductive methods
in France and England. France leads in expression and style of thought,
although, upon the whole, less sound in substance than Germany. England
and France in her best period have given us the most far-reaching and
permanent generalizations in biology. It follows that the American
student who can afford the experience will profit most by placing
himself successively in the scientific atmosphere of Germany, France,
and England. My own post-graduate education was unfortunately not of
this three-sided type. None the less, it has always seemed a most
fortunate circumstance that in the spring of 1879 a letter from the
venerable Kitchen Parker led me to Cambridge and to the great privilege
of sitting under Balfour, the most brilliant and lovable of men. In the
following autumn Huxley’s lectures upon Comparative Zoology began in
October, and by entering this course I came to know personally this
great master and through him to enjoy the rare opportunity of meeting
Charles Darwin. After this experience, which was equally open to any
serious student of biology at that time, it is natural that I should
strongly advise those of you who are planning your foreign studies to
spend part of your time in England and endeavor to discern some of the
distinctive qualities of English men of science which Huxley so nobly
illustrated. You will pardon the personal element in the following
recollections of Huxley as a teacher and the rather informal review of
his life-work.

Huxley as a teacher can never be forgotten by any of his students. He
entered his lecture-room promptly as the clock was striking nine, rather
quickly and with his head bent forward “as if oppressive with its mind.”
He usually glanced attention to his class of about ninety and began
speaking before he reached his chair. He spoke between his lips, with
perfectly clear analysis, with thorough interest, and with philosophic
insight which was far above the average of his students. He used very
few charts, but handled the chalk with great skill, sketching out the
anatomy of an animal as if it were a transparent object. As in Darwin’s
face, and as in Erasmus Darwin’s, Buffon’s, and many other anatomists
with a strong sense of form, his eyes were heavily overhung by a
projecting forehead and eyebrows and seemed at times to look inward. His
lips were firm and closely set, with the expression of positiveness, and
the other feature which most marked him was the very heavy mass of hair
falling over his forehead, which he would frequently stroke or toss
back. Occasionally he would lighten up the monotony of anatomical
description by a bit of humor. I remember one instance which was
probably reminiscent of his famous tilt with Bishop Wilberforce at the
meeting of the British Association in 1860. Huxley was describing the
mammalian heart and had just distinguished between the tricuspid valve,
on the right side of the heart, and the bicuspid valve, on the left,
which you know resembles a bishop’s mitre, and hence is known as the
mitral valve. He said:

  It is not easy to recall on which side these respective valves are
  found, but I recommend this rule: you can easily remember that the
  mitral is on the left, because a bishop is never known to be on the
  right.

Huxley was the father of modern laboratory instruction, but in 1879 he
was so intensely engrossed with his own researches that he very seldom
came through the laboratory, which was ably directed by T. Jeffrey
Parker, assisted by G. B. Howes and W. Newton Parker, all of whom are
now professors, Howes having succeeded to Huxley’s chair. Each visit
therefore inspired a certain amount of terror, which was really
unwarranted, for Huxley always spoke in the kindest tones to his
students, although sometimes he could not resist making fun at their
expense. There was an Irish student who sat in front of me, whose
anatomical drawings in water-color were certainly most remarkable
productions. Huxley, in turning over his drawing-book, paused at a large
blur under which was carefully inscribed “sheep’s liver” and smilingly
said: “I am glad to know that is a liver; it reminds me as much of
Cologne Cathedral in a fog as of anything I have ever seen before.”
Fortunately the nationality of the student enabled him to fully
appreciate the humor.

The greatest event in the winter of 1879 was Darwin’s first and only
visit to the laboratory. They came in together, Huxley leading slowly
down the long, narrow room, pointing out the especial methods of
teaching, which he had originated and which are now universally adopted
in England and in this country. Darwin was instantly recognized by the
class as he entered and sent a thrill of curiosity down the room, for no
one present had ever seen him before. There was the widest possible
contrast in the two faces. Darwin’s grayish-white hair and bushy
eyebrows overshadowed a pair of deeply set blue eyes, which seemed to
image his wonderfully calm and deep vision of nature and at the same
time to emit benevolence. Huxley’s piercing black eyes and determined
and resolute face were full of admiration and, at the same time,
protection of his older friend. He said afterward: “You know, I have to
take care of him; in fact, I have always been Darwin’s bulldog,” and
this exactly expressed one of the many relations which existed so long
between the two men.

Huxley was not always fortunate in the intellectual caliber of the men
to whom he lectured in the Royal College of Science. Many of the younger
generation were studying in the universities, under Balfour at Cambridge
and under Rolleston at Oxford. However, Saville Kent, C. Lloyd Morgan,
George B. Howes, T. Jeffrey Parker and W. Newton Parker are
representative biologists who were directly trained by Huxley. Many
others, not his students, have expressed the deepest indebtedness to
him. Among these especially are Professor E. Ray Lankester, of Oxford,
and Professor Michael Foster, of Cambridge. Huxley once said that he had
“discovered Foster.” He not only singled men out, but knew how to direct
and inspire them to investigate the most pressing problems of the day.
As it was, his thirty-one years of lectures would have produced a far
greater effect if they had been delivered from an Oxford, Cambridge or
Edinburgh chair. In fact, Huxley’s whole life would have been different,
in some ways more effective, in others less so, if the universities had
welcomed the young genius who was looking for a post and even cast his
eyes toward America in 1850, but in those early days of classical
prestige both seats of learning were dead to the science which it was
Huxley’s great service in support of Darwin to place beside physics in
the lead of all others in England. Moreover, Oxford, if not Cambridge,
could not long have sheltered such a wolf in the fold.

Huxley’s public addresses always gave the impression of being largely
impromptu, but he once told me: “I always think out carefully every word
I am going to say. There is no greater danger than the so-called
_inspiration of the moment_, which leads you to say something which is
not exactly true or which you would regret afterward. I sometimes envy
your countrymen their readiness and believe that a native American, if
summoned out of bed at midnight, could step to his window and speak well
upon any subject.” I told him I feared he had been slightly misinformed;
I feared that many American impromptu speeches were distinguished more
by a flow of language than of ideas. But Huxley was sometimes very
impressive when he did not speak. In 1879 he was strongly advocating the
removal of the Royal School of Mines from crowded Jermyn street to South
Kensington, a matter which is still being agitated. At a public dinner
given by the alumni of the school, who were naturally attached to the
old buildings, the chairman was indiscreet enough to make an attack upon
the policy of removal. He was vigorously applauded, when, to every one’s
consternation, Huxley, who was sitting at the chairman’s right, slowly
rose, paused a moment, and then silently skirted the tables and walked
out of the hall. A solemn pall fell over us, which lasted throughout the
dinner, and we were all glad to find an excuse to leave early.

In personal conversation Huxley was full of humor and greatly enjoyed
stories at his own expense. Such was the following:

  In my early period as a lecturer I had very little confidence in my
  general powers, but one thing I prided myself upon was clearness. I
  was once talking of the brain before a large mixed audience and soon
  began to feel that no one in the room understood me. Finally I saw the
  thoroughly interested face of a woman auditor and took consolation in
  delivering the remainder of the lecture directly to her. At the close,
  my feeling as to her interest was confirmed when she came up and asked
  if she might put one question upon a single point which she had not
  quite understood. “Certainly,” I replied. “Now, Professor,” she said,
  “is the cerebellum inside or outside of the skull?”

A story of his about babies is also characteristic:

  When a fond mother calls upon me to admire her baby I never fail to
  respond, and, while cooing appropriately, I take advantage of an
  opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of its feet turn in
  and tend to support my theory of arboreal descent.

Huxley’s life is as full of suggestion to the student as were his
lectures and his conversation. It illustrates the force of obtaining a
very broad view of the animal kingdom before we attempt to enter the
plane of higher generalization. Huxley’s training in embryology,
vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, palæontology, and geology was not
mapped out for him as for the modern university student. His prolonged
sea voyage gave him time and material for reflection, and after this he
was led from one subject to another until he obtained a grasp of nature
as a whole second only to that of Darwin.

Huxley was born in 1825. Like Goethe, he inherited from his mother his
brilliantly alert powers of thought, and from his father his courage and
tenacity of purpose, a combination of qualities which especially fitted
him for the period in which he was to live. There is nothing striking
recorded about his boyhood as a naturalist. He preferred engineering but
was led into medicine.

At the close of his medical course he secured a navy medical post upon
the _Rattlesnake_. This brought with it, as to Darwin, the training of a
four years’ voyage to the South Seas off eastern Australia and west
Guinea—a more liberal education to a naturalist than any university
affords, even at the present day. This voyage began at twenty-one, and
he says of it:

  But, apart from experience of this kind and the opportunity afforded
  for scientific work, to me, personally, the cruise was extremely
  valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline, to be
  down on the realities of existence by living on bare necessities, to
  find out how extremely worth living life seemed to be when one woke
  from a night’s rest on a soft plank, with the sky for a canopy and
  cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for breakfast, and more
  especially to learn to work for what I got for myself out of it. My
  brother officers were as good as sailors ought to be and generally
  are, but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my
  pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in the pursuit of
  the objects which my friends, the middies, christened “Buffons,” after
  the title conspicuous on a volume of the “Suites à Buffon,” which
  stood in a prominent place on my shelf in the chart room.

As the result of this voyage of four years numerous papers were sent
home to the Linnæan Society of London, but few were published; upon his
return his first great work, “Upon the Anatomy and Affinities of the
Medusæ,” was declined for publication by the Admiralty—a fortunate
circumstance, for it led to his quitting the navy for good and trusting
to his own resources. Upon publication, this memoir at once established
his scientific reputation at the early age of twenty-four, just as
Richard Owen had won his spurs by his “Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus.”
In 1852 Huxley’s preference as a biologist was to turn back to
physiology, which had become the favorite study of his medical course.
But his fate was to enter and become distinguished in a widely different
branch, which had as little attraction for him as for most students of
marine life, namely, palæontology. He says of his sudden change of base:

  At last, in 1854, on the translation of my warm friend, Edward Forbes,
  to Edinburgh, Sir Henry de la Beche, the Director-General of the
  Geological Survey, offered me the post Forbes had vacated of
  Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History. I refused the former
  point-blank, and accepted the latter only provisionally, telling Sir
  Henry that I did not care for fossils and that I should give up
  natural history as soon as I could get a physiological post. But I
  held the office for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has
  been palæontological.

From this time until 1885 his labors extended over the widest field of
biology and of philosophy ever covered by any naturalist, with the
single exception of Aristotle. In philosophy Huxley showed rare critical
and historical power; he made the most exhaustive study of Hume, but his
own philosophical spirit and temper were more directly the offspring of
Descartes. Some subjects he mastered, others he merely touched, but
every subject which he wrote about he illuminated. Huxley did not
discover or first define protoplasm, but he made it known to the
English-speaking world as the physical basis of life, recognizing the
unity of animal and plant protoplasm. He cleared up certain problems
among the Protozoa. In 1849 appeared his great work upon the oceanic
Hydrozoa, and familiarity with these forms doubtless suggested the
brilliant comparison of the two-layered gastrula to the adult Hydrozoa.
He threw light upon the Tunicata, describing the endostyle as a
universal feature, but not venturing to raise the Tunicata to a separate
order. He set in order the cephalopod mollusca, deriving the spiral from
the straight-shelled fossil forms. He contributed to the Arthropoda; his
last word upon this group being his charming little volume upon the
“Crayfish,” a model of its kind. But think of the virgin field which
opened up before him among the vertebrata, when in 1859 he was the first
to perceive the truth of Darwin’s theory of descent! Here were Cuvier’s
and Owen’s vast researches upon living and extinct forms, a disorderly
chaos of facts waiting for generalization. Huxley was the man for the
time. He had already secured a thoroughly philosophical basis for his
comparative osteology by studying the new embryology of Von Baer, which
Richard Owen had wholly ignored. In 1858 his famous Croonian lecture on
the “Theory of the Vertebrate Skull” gave the death-blow to Owen’s
life-work upon the skull and vertebral archetype and to the whole system
of mystical and transcendental anatomy; and now Huxley set to work
vigorously to build out of Owen’s scattered tribes the great limbs and
branches of the vertebrate tree. He set the fishes and batrachia apart
as the _Icthyopsidan_ branch, the reptiles and birds as the
_Sauropsidan_ in contrast with the _Mammalian_, which he derived from a
prosauropsidan or amphibian stem, a theory which with some modification
has received strong recent verification.

Professor Owen, who had held undisputed sway in England up to 1858,
fought nobly for opinions which had been idolized in the first
half-century, but was routed at every point. Huxley captured his last
fortress when, in his famous essay of 1865, “Man’s Place in Nature,” he
undermined Owen’s teaching of the separate and distinct anatomical
position of man. We can only appreciate Huxley’s fighting qualities when
we see how strongly Owen was intrenched at the beginning of this long
battle royal; he was director of the British Museum and occupied other
high posts; he had the strong moral support of the government and of the
royal family, although these were weak allies in a scientific encounter.

Huxley’s powers of rapid generalization, of course, betrayed him
frequently; his Bathybius was a groundless and short-lived hypothesis;
he went far astray in the phylogeny of the horses. But these and other
errors were far less attributable to defects in his reasoning powers
than to the extraordinarily high pressure under which he worked for the
twenty years between 1860 and 1880, when duties upon the Educational
Board, upon the Government Fisheries Commission, and upon Parliamentary
committees crowded upon him. He had at his command none of the resources
of modern technique. He cut his own sections. I remember once seeing
some of his microscopic sections. To one of our college junior students
working with a Minot microtome Huxley’s sections would have appeared
like translucent beefsteaks—another illustration that it is not always
the section which reveals the natural law, but the man who looks at the
section.

Huxley was a master not only in the search for truth but in the way in
which he presented it, both in writing and in speaking. And we are
assured, largely as he was gifted by nature, his beautifully lucid and
interesting style was partly the result of deliberate hard work. He was
not born to it; some of his early essays are rather labored; he acquired
it. He was familiar with the best Greek literature and restudied the
language; he pored over Milton and Carlyle and Mill; he studied the fine
old English of the Bible; he took as especial models Hume and Hobbes,
until finally he wrote his mother tongue as no other Englishman wrote
it. Take up any one of his essays, biological, literary, philosophical,
you at once see his central idea and his main purpose, although he never
uses italics or spaced letters, as many of our German masters do to
relieve the obscurity of their sentences. We are carried along upon the
broad current of his reasoning without being confused by his abundant
side illustrations. He gleaned from the literature of all time until his
mind was stocked with apt similes. Who but Huxley would have selected
the title “Lay Sermons” for his first volume of addresses; or, in 1880,
twenty-one years after Darwin’s work appeared, would have entitled his
essay upon the influence of this work “The Coming of Age of the Origin
of Species”? Or to whom else would it have occurred to repeat over the
grave of Balfour the exquisitely appropriate lines: “For Lycidas is
dead, dead ere his prime”? Who else could have inveighed thus against
modern specialization:

  We are in the case of Tarpeia, who opened the gates of the Roman
  citadel to the Sabines and was crushed by the weight of the reward
  bestowed upon her. It has become impossible for any man to keep pace
  with the progress of the whole of any important branch of science. It
  looks as if the scientific, like other revolutions, meant to devour
  its own children; as if the growth of science tended to overwhelm its
  votaries; as if the man of science of the future were condemned to
  diminish into a narrow specialist as time goes on. It appears to me
  that the only defense against this tendency to the degeneration of
  scientific workers lies in the organization and extension of
  scientific education in such a manner as to secure breadth of culture
  without superficiality; and, on the other hand, depth and precision of
  knowledge without narrowness.

What Haeckel did for evolution in Germany, Huxley did in England. As the
earliest and most ardent supporter of Darwin and the theory of descent,
it is remarkable that he never gave an unreserved support to the theory
of natural selection as all-sufficient. Twenty-five years ago, with his
usual penetration and prophetic insight, he showed that the problem of
variation might, after all, be the greater problem; and only three years
ago, in his Romanes Lecture, he disappointed many of the disciples of
Darwin by declaring that natural selection failed to explain the origin
of our moral and ethical nature. Whether he was right or wrong we will
not stop to discuss, but consider the still more remarkable conditions
of Huxley’s relations to the theory of evolution. As expositor, teacher,
defender, he was the high priest of evolution. From the first he saw the
strong and weak points of the special Darwinian theory; he wrote upon
the subject for thirty years, and yet he never contributed a single
original or novel idea to it; in other words, Huxley added vastly to the
demonstration, but never added to the sum of either theory or working
hypothesis, and the contemporary history of the theory proper could be
written without mentioning his name. This lack of speculation upon the
factors of evolution was true throughout his whole life; in the voyage
of the _Rattlesnake_, he says, he did not even think of the species
problem. His last utterance regarding the causes of evolution appeared
in one of the reviews as a passing criticism of Weismann’s finished
philosophy, in which he implies that his own philosophy of the causes of
evolution was as far off as ever; in other words, Huxley never fully
made up his mind or committed himself to any causal theory of
development.

Taking the nineteenth century at large, outside of our own circles of
biology Huxley’s greatest and most permanent achievement was his victory
for free thought. Personally we may not be agnostic; we may disagree
with much that he has said and written, but we must admire Huxley’s
valiant services none the less. A reformer must be an extremist, and
Huxley was often extreme, but he never said what he did not believe to
be true. If it is easy for you and for me to say what we think, in print
and out of print now, it is because of the battles fought by such men as
Huxley and Haeckel. When Huxley began his great crusade the air was full
of religious intolerance, and, what is quite as bad, scientific shams.
If Huxley had entered the contest carefully and guardedly, he would have
been lost in the enemies’ ranks, but he struck right and left with
sledge-hammer blows, whether it was a high dignitary of the church or of
the state. Just before the occasion of one of his greatest contests,
that with Gladstone in the pages of _The Contemporary Review_, Huxley
was in Switzerland, completely broken down in health and suffering from
torpidity of the liver. Gladstone had written one of his
characteristically brilliant articles upon the close correspondence
between the Order of Creation as revealed in the first chapter of
Genesis and the Order of Evolution as shown by modern biology. “When
this article reached me,” Huxley told me, “I read it through and it made
me so angry that I believe it must have acted upon my liver. At all
events, when I finished my reply to Gladstone I felt better than I had
for months past.”

Huxley’s last public appearance was at the meeting of the British
Association at Oxford in 1894. He had been very urgently invited to
attend, for, about a third of a century before, the association had met
at Oxford and Huxley had had his famous encounter with Bishop
Wilberforce. It was felt that the anniversary would be a historic one
and incomplete without his presence, and so it proved to be. Huxley’s
especial duty was to second the vote of thanks for the Marquis of
Salisbury’s address, one of the invariable formalities of the opening
meeting of the association. The meeting proved to be the greatest one in
the history of the association. The Sheldonian Theatre was packed with
one of the most distinguished scientific audiences ever brought
together, and the address of the Marquis was worthy of the occasion. The
whole tenor of it was the unknown in science. Passing from the unsolved
problems of astronomy, chemistry and physics, he came to biology. With
delicate irony he spoke of the “_comforting word, evolution_,” and
passing to the Weismannian controversy implied that the diametrically
opposed views so frequently expressed nowadays threw the whole process
of evolution into doubt. It was only too evident that the Marquis
himself found no comfort in evolution and even entertained a suspicion
as to its probability. It was well worth the whole journey to Oxford to
watch Huxley during this portion of the address. In his red
doctor-of-laws gown, placed upon his shoulders by the very body of men
who had once referred to him as “a Mr. Huxley,” he sank deeper into his
chair upon the very front of the platform and restlessly tapped his
foot. His situation was an unenviable one. He had to thank an ex-Prime
Minister of England and present Chancellor of Oxford University for an
address the sentiments of which were directly against those he himself
had been maintaining for twenty-five years. He said afterward that when
the proofs of the Marquis’s address were put in his hands the day
before, he realized that he had before him a most delicate and difficult
task.

Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thompson), one of the most distinguished living
physicists, first moved the vote of thanks, but his reception was
nothing to the tremendous applause which greeted Huxley in the heart of
that university whose traditional principles he had so long been
opposing. Considerable anxiety had been felt by his friends lest his
voice would fail to fill the theatre, for it had signally failed during
the Romanes Lecture delivered in Oxford the year before, but when Huxley
arose he reminded one of a venerable gladiator returning to the arena
after years of absence. He raised his figure and his voice to full
height, and, with one foot turned over the edge of the step, veiled an
unmistakable and vigorous protest in the most gracious and dignified
speech of thanks.

Throughout the subsequent special sessions of this meeting Huxley could
not appear. He gave the impression of being aged, if not infirm, but no
one realized that he had spoken his last word as champion of the law of
evolution. He soon returned to Eastbourne. Early in the winter he
contracted the grippe, which passed into pneumonia. He rallied once or
twice, and his last effort to complete a reply to Balfour’s “Foundations
of Belief” hastened his death, which came upon June 29, 1895, at the age
of seventy.

I have endeavored to show in how many ways Huxley was a model for us of
the younger generation. In the central hall of the British Museum of
Natural History sits in marble the life-size figure of Charles Darwin;
upon his right will soon be placed a beautiful statue of Richard Owen,
and I know that there are many who will enjoy taking some share in the
movement to complete this group with the noble figure of Thomas Henry
Huxley.

  _The above Memorial was delivered before the New York Academy of
  Sciences November 11, 1895. It was then revised and delivered as “A
  Student’s Reminiscences of Huxley” to the assembly of students at the
  Marine Biological Laboratory of Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. As printed
  in this form it was sent to Leonard Huxley, who wrote the following
  letter of acknowledgment_:

                                                            CHARTERHOUSE
                                                            GODALMING
                                                            12 July 1897

  DEAR PROFESSOR OSBORN:

  I have still to thank you, & that most warmly, for your admirable
  “Lecture at Wood’s Hole.” It is not merely a pleasant reminder of my
  meeting with you seven years ago, but one of the very best memorial
  sketches of my father which have yet appeared, & so written as somehow
  to succeed in touching one’s personal feelings beyond the ordinary.
  Indeed if I had written to you immediately after my first reading of
  it, what I wrote might have appeared a trifle exaggerated. So you will
  forgive my apparent remissness in not acknowledging the receipt of it
  before. I do hope you will allow me to quote from your lecture, in the
  Life I am working upon—a long task, of which I am now somewhere about
  the middle.

  Will you also be kind enough to tell me to what precisely you refer
  when you speak of my father’s forming a wrong generalisation about the
  phylogeny of the horse? His views before or after his American visit
  of 1876? I do not know enough of the subject first-hand.

  Once more, let me thank you for your dear & sympathetic piece of work
  & believe me

                                                    Sincerely yours,
                                                (Signed) LEONARD HUXLEY.

[Illustration:

  FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR
]




                        FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR
                               1851–1882

  To Huxley and to Balfour, younger brother of Arthur Balfour, my first
  and most inspiring teacher in comparative embryology, I dedicated my
  work, “The Age of Mammals.” Balfour’s genius was beyond imitation, but
  his pupils may follow the example of his ardent enthusiasm and his
  genial way of living the life of science.


                        FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR

About a year ago came the sad news of the sudden death of Professor
Balfour, of Cambridge. If the loss was felt less severely in this
country than in England it was only because he had fewer personal
friends here, and to fully understand his worth one must have known and
talked with him. It is true that it required no unusual insight to read
the fine qualities of the man in his writings, but none save those who
knew him could appreciate his remarkable personal attractiveness. Not
the least part of the wonderful work of his short life was that which he
accomplished as a teacher; here, as everywhere, his personal influence
had a large share, and a sketch of Balfour’s scientific work would be
incomplete without a recognition of the bearing which his noble
character had upon it.

The meeting of leading biologists to found the memorial studentship was
remarkable in many ways; rarely have been heard such words of admiration
and love for one man as were then expressed for Balfour. Many spoke at
length of the debt Cambridge owed him. It may be said that he divided
with Foster the honor of giving the great impetus to the biological
movement in the English universities. What Huxley had done for Foster
the latter did for Balfour, giving him the first hearty encouragement
and support; together they raised biology from the third to the level of
the first rank of studies at Cambridge, equalling that held by
mathematics. Oxford soon followed this important movement, trying to
secure Balfour for the professorship left vacant by the death of
Rolleston. His connection with natural science at Cambridge was
described in warm language by Foster, his teacher, and by Sedgwick, one
of his pupils; he advanced morphology there by his brilliant success in
teaching and in research.

In teaching he combined manly force with a delicate regard for the
feelings of his pupils. From the writer’s personal impressions of him as
a lecturer, he did not aim at eloquence, but to be understood in every
step. Rarely looking at his hearers, he spoke rapidly and with intense
earnestness, crowding a vast deal into the hour. The main qualities of
his character shone forth in his lectures: energy, which he infused into
his hearers; truthfulness, which soon gave implicit confidence in his
statements; modesty and sympathy, which inspired effort and free
exchange of thought.

Balfour’s love of truth came constantly into play in his laboratory
instruction. While looking over a student’s shoulder he would sometimes
say with a laugh: “You must interpret that specimen with the eye of
faith”; but this was very far from being a serious injunction, for he
exacted of his students the greatest caution in the progress of their
microscopic work. However tempting a certain interpretation of a
specimen might be, Balfour never accepted it until it rested on the
clearest evidence. An instance of this sort is recalled which related to
the much disputed origin of a well-known embryonic structure. A number
of sections had been prepared, seeming to confirm the view which Balfour
himself had advocated some time before; it required considerable
self-control not to attach a somewhat forced meaning to them. This was,
however, forbidden, and it was not until several days afterward that
fresh sections established the fact beyond question.

To Foster, Balfour repaid his student-debt by extending, in turn,
continued encouragement to others. He did not fear, as many great
teachers have, that joint labor with his juniors would derogate from his
reputation. His joint articles are numerous; he was zealous to recognize
research done by his pupils, seeming to be prouder of this than of his
own work. Nothing could be more stimulating to the young men about him,
still distrustful of their powers, than this generous co-operation. Is
it surprising, then, that the voluntary attendance upon his lectures
increased in seven years from ten to ninety and that at the time of his
death twenty students were engaged in difficult research in his
laboratory? Only those who are familiar by experience with the few
incentives among younger students to the study of biology can appreciate
what these numbers mean.

We need not attempt to give a full list of Balfour’s writings. They
began in 1873, his twenty-second year, with a few short papers appearing
over Foster’s name and his own in _The Quarterly Journal of
Microscopical Science_; they terminated nine years later with his fine
work upon Peripatus, published posthumously in the same journal. His
extensive intermediate works, “The Elasmobranch Fishes” and “Comparative
Embryology,” are universally known.

From the first he devoted himself to embryology. While this, as among
the youngest of the biological sciences, admits of rapid work, it is far
from admitting rapid generalization. No other branch of morphology
requires more painstaking; the very materials one has to study are
minute and indefinite, and two minds will often place different
constructions upon the same specimen. There is abundant opportunity for
scientific guesswork, with the feeling of security that disproval will
be difficult. Balfour understood the real value of guessing at truth,
but he always made it very clear to the reader when he was so doing; his
hypotheses were accompanied by definite statements in which the reasons
pro and con were set forth in all impartiality to each. Herein lies the
chief charm and merit of his work, its brilliant suggestiveness, side by
side but never in confusion with well-established facts. Every chapter
contains half a dozen invitations to other investigators to prove or
disprove certain provisional statements. Vast as is the information
contained in his “Comparative Embryology,” Balfour himself appreciated
that, as far as mere facts went, the first volume would be somewhat out
of date before the second was in press. Not so, however, with his
masterly discussions of these facts, which are found on every page and
the value of which, to embryologists, cannot be estimated. Moreover, to
his authorship is largely due the rapidly spreading interest in
embryology in England and America—a branch of science, it will be
remembered, which had previously been mostly in German hands.

One frequently heard from him his own very modest opinion of his work;
this was not at all inconsistent with striking independence and
originality of thought and adherence to his convictions. His modesty
added more to the recognition of his genius than any assertions of his
own could have done. Many were pressing forward to assert his claims,
and honors were showered upon him in England and abroad. He was admired
and beloved by all who knew him. In scientific discussion he had the
rare quality, which Richard Cobden is said to have possessed, of
remaining on the pleasantest personal terms with his opponents.

His energy in all matters was great and his power of writing was
unusually rapid; but, advised by kind friends, he rarely overtaxed his
strength, which was limited. He spent most of his evenings with his
friends, throwing off from his mind the labors of the day and talking
vivaciously upon the topics of the time. When the first volume of his
“Comparative Embryology” was being written, he generally worked but five
hours daily, giving much time to physical exercise, bicycling or tennis,
into which he entered with all the enthusiasm of his nature. He was
courageous but not reckless, and nothing in his previous life would lead
us to suppose that the mountain climb which proved fatal was undertaken
in a foolhardy spirit.

Balfour in a few years accomplished the work of a lifetime. His
influence was and is twofold: first, upon those with whom he came into
personal contact, especially his scientific associates and students, an
influence which cannot fail to endure (well expressed by Professor
Kitchen Parker: “I feel that his presence is still with me; I cannot
lose the sense of his presence”); secondly, the influence of his
scientific work, which for genius, breadth, and truth can never be
surpassed. May the splendid memorial which has been raised for him
perpetuate his noble example as a teacher and man of science.

[Illustration:

  _From a photograph by Brown Brothers_

  JAMES BRYCE
]




                              JAMES BRYCE
                               1838–1922

  I had the privilege of knowing James Bryce for many years and enjoyed
  many long and delightful conversations with him. Beyond all other
  great men I have known he impressed me as most eager for broad and
  deep knowledge both of men and of nature. He gained more by travel and
  direct observation than by reading the works of others.

  Although an address was carefully thought out, the following was
  entirely extemporaneous, because I was suddenly called upon to deliver
  it in the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—quite a
  contrast to the customary platform of the college and university
  lecturer! I felt compelled by the surrounding religious atmosphere to
  use a text, which was happily afforded by the choir as it sang
  Newman’s beautiful hymn as a processional.


                              JAMES BRYCE

I am not permitted to have a text, because I am not a preacher. As a
naturalist, I am speaking here by invitation of the Bishop and the Dean
of this Cathedral on the life of James Bryce as a student of man and of
nature. I find in the opening of the beautiful hymn sung by the choir on
entering this Cathedral the words which I cannot resist paraphrasing as
the central thought of what I am about to say: Lead, Kindly Light, amid
the encircling confusion.

“Lead, Kindly Light,” was the inner motive of the life of James
Bryce—the kindly light of the genial nature of a man of faith and
confidence, of a man of rugged resolution and constant determination,
who never faltered in his efforts, whether it was a physical, or social,
or intellectual, or political problem, to throw upon it the light of
most careful and thorough examination.

Then another line of the same beautiful poem of John Henry Newman,

               O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,

reveals the other aspect of the life of James Bryce which will impress
you if you will read his four volumes as a traveler and explorer. When
confused by the world and by the strife of political parties, Bryce
would go off quietly on one of these great journeys of his, borne by his
stout Scotch heart and by his indomitable energy as a mountain-climber.
Brought up in a climate which brings out the best qualities in a
man—that hardy nursery of strong Britons; born in northern Ireland,
where the kindly qualities and genial nature of the Irish blend with the
sturdy persistence of the Scotch, he was equipped by birth as well as by
the early training of a remarkable father to enter life along many paths
which opened out before him.

Follow him, no doubt somewhat confused, at the age of thirty-nine, after
a period of political service in Parliament and lectureship in Oxford
University, on that remarkable journey through and beyond the countries
which he studied in his “Holy Roman Empire,” into and through Asia
Minor, into the region on the borderland of Armenia, in search of Mount
Ararat, and you observe an event in his life most typical and
characteristic. Every one told him it was impossible to ascend Mount
Ararat. One after another the parties that started with him fell behind,
until, finally, about four or five thousand feet from the summit, he was
entirely alone, and from that point he pushed on to the hollow between
the twin peaks where the Bible myth tells us the Ark of Noah rested. He
did not find any traces of the Ark, but he seems to have found, in that
ascent and in the wonderful survey which the ascent gave him of the
great tides of human history which have ebbed and flowed around the base
of that mountain, a new and fresh perspective for all his future
historical works. There, also, at the turning-point in life, when
according to some men the critical age of forty is reached, James Bryce
reversed the natural order of things, and until the age of
eighty-three—during the latter part of which period I had the honor of
making his acquaintance—became a younger man, a larger man, a greater
man every year to all those who had the pleasure and privilege and
inspiration of knowing him.

What a contrast his thoroughness with the superficiality of other men
who have treated the same broad periods of human history, of human
activity, and to whom many people appeal for light and guidance! Wells,
writing his “Outline of History” from his armchair, guided by the work
of all the authors upon whom he could lay his hand; Bryce, seeking out
the fountains, the origins, the beginnings of these wonderful movements
of peoples which are summed up in the words “Human History.” Himself
retreading the paths worn by men for centuries, observing that wonderful
variety of races of men where, in entering Transcaucasia, he came on the
borders between Turkey and the Russian Dominions; again, when in South
Africa, he touched the life of the Kaffirs, of the Hottentots, and of
that race of Bushmen which stands at the very bottom of the human scale;
finally, in South America, at the age of seventy-four, he entered the
intimate life of a people he had not touched before, of the Spanish, the
Portuguese, the native Indians of the South American Continent—always
traveling with the same genial attitude, the same kindliness, the same
lack of criticism, which distinguished his life and writings throughout.

Small wonder that, having as a boy and young man been brought up among
the British people, among the Scotch, the Irish, the English, the
Scotch-Irish, who are the fountains of our own American life, when he
came to America he understood the Americans and was welcomed as one of
us, as a man who could interpret our life, our institutions, who could
tell us the truth about ourselves without our being offended, the most
difficult message that any one coming from any other part of the world
can give to the American!

Now we find that Bryce is not dead! James Bryce is not dead! James Bryce
is living! He will live! Out of his inspiration, from those penetrating
eyes, from that wonderful intellect, from those profound and unbiassed
and unprejudiced studies, out of the fruits of years of personal
experience, he finally surveys our American institutions in the last,
and one of the greatest, of his works, “Modern Democracies.” Nothing
could attest the truthfulness of his nature more clearly than the fact
that the note of that volume is so different from the note of his early,
confident writings as a young ardent Liberal, almost Radical. He found
in our midst, and in the new democracies everywhere, so many confusing
thoughts, so many unexpected counter-currents, that he comes out, as
does every great and profound student of human life and human affairs
who approaches the matter from the scientific standpoint of profound
knowledge, with a clear warning of the dangers which surround us if we
do not take heed and if we lose the art of choosing our leaders, our
spiritual leaders, our intellectual leaders, our political leaders.

Leadership! Leadership is the last note, to my mind, of Bryce’s life. He
is leading. He himself will lead because he has become now, and I
believe for all time, the Kindly Light which will guide us through the
interpretation of our American institutions.

[Illustration:

  _From a painting by A. Edelfelt_

  LOUIS PASTEUR
]




                             LOUIS PASTEUR
                               1822–1895

  To my mind Louis Pasteur is the greatest benefactor of mankind since
  the time of Jesus Christ, and as he was inspired by religious
  sentiment I claim that he should be enrolled among the saints and
  enshrined in our cathedrals. It is of this aspect of his life that
  “The New Order of Sainthood” deals. Contemplation of this aspect of
  his life led me to reflections upon Nature and Religion, in which I
  was greatly aided by my previous studies in the natural philosophy of
  the Greeks and of Augustine and was guided to the wonderful passages
  of Dante in “The Divine Comedy” by Bishop Boyd-Carpenter. The sequel
  to this address is to be found in “Evolution and Religion,” my reply
  to William Jennings Bryan.


                       THE NEW ORDER OF SAINTHOOD

Among all the great scientific men whom the nineteenth century produced
Pasteur ranks supreme as a benefactor of mankind. He played the original
and creative part in the movement for the prevention and relief of human
suffering which Sir William Osler has aptly termed “Man’s Redemption of
Man.” It is far under the truth to say that he has saved more lives than
Napoleon destroyed. In nature he found the causes of a very large part
of human suffering; in nature he also found the means of controlling or
averting suffering. His attitude toward his fellow men was one of noble
compassion. His first trial of the hydrophobia serum with a young
sufferer brought to him, his agony of mind lest the remedy itself might
be the means of causing death, his joy as the child was restored in
perfect health to its parents, is one of the most beautiful episodes in
human history. As recited by Radot, “Pasteur was going through a
succession of hopes, fears, anguish, and an ardent yearning to snatch
little Meister from death; he could no longer work. At night feverish
visions came to him of this child, whom he had seen playing in the
garden, suffocating in the mad struggles of hydrophobia, like the dying
child he had seen at the Hôpital Trousseau in 1880. Vainly his
experimental genius assured him that the virus of that most terrible of
diseases was about to be vanquished, that humanity was about to be
delivered from this dread horror—his human tenderness was stronger than
all, his accustomed ready sympathy for the sufferings and anxieties of
others was for the nonce centred in ‘the dear lad.’...

“Cured from his wounds, delighted with all he saw, gayly running about
as if he had been in his own Alsatian farm, little Meister, whose blue
eyes now showed neither fear nor shyness, merrily received the last
inoculation; in the evening, after claiming a kiss from ‘Dear Monsieur
Pasteur,’ as he called him, he went to bed and slept peacefully.”[4]

The life of Pasteur is typical of that of many students of nature, of
less genius, perhaps, but of equal devotion and self-sacrifice. It is
interesting to imagine what tributes might have been rendered to Pasteur
if he had lived in the period of the early saints of the Church and had
won the love of his generation and the reverence of succeeding
generations by his mighty works. It is interesting to surmise what would
have been the attitude of the early Church toward such a benefactor of
mankind. Our belief today is that Pasteur should stand as a symbol of
the profound and intimate relation which must develop between the study
of nature and the religious life of man, between our present and future
knowledge of nature and the development of our religious conceptions and
beliefs.


In a very beautiful address[5] before the students of the University of
Edinburgh Sir William Osler opens with the words: “To man there has been
published a triple gospel—of his soul, of his goods, of his body.” What
is and what shall be the attitude of the Church toward the gospel of the
body, toward the men who have given us this gospel? The question turns
our thoughts at once to the leading and greatest exponent of this
gospel, and backward to the early centuries of the Church before there
had arisen any divorce between the study of nature and the matters of
the spirit.

We are now in a process of readjustment between the issues of two lines
of thought, which are almost as old as human history; between laws
derived from nature which were discovered in the middle of the
nineteenth century as to the origin of man, and traditional laws which
when traced to their very beginnings we find to have been purely of
human conception. Let us imagine our descendants three or four hundred
years hence looking back on the spiritual and intellectual history of
man; with larger perspective, they will separate these two grand
thought-movements:

First, the Oriental movement, marked by Oriental lack of curiosity about
natural law, a great moral and spiritual movement developing three
thousand years before Christ along the Nile, the Tigris, and Euphrates,
out of five thousand years of hard human experience, and expressed in
Judea in the faith that nature is the continuous handiwork of God, in a
supreme standard of righteousness, the moral duty being finally summed
up in the single phrase, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This
was the spiritual redemption of man, which left the laws of his physical
welfare unknown and uncared for.

The second movement begins six centuries before Christ in the inquiring
mind of the West, which is always characterized by intense curiosity
about nature. This movement is the search for natural law. Its rapid
progress among the Greeks terminates with the fall of Greece. It is
expressed in Cato’s reply to Scipio: “My wisdom consists in the fact
that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a God and am loyal
to her commands.” After nineteen centuries it revives with Copernicus
and Galileo and culminates in Darwin. Man is again perceived as a part
of nature; in the study of nature man finds intellectual delight; in the
laws of nature man finds his physical well-being; man through nature
becomes the redeemer of physical man.

The Augustinian theology was imbued with a deeply theistic view of
nature, a view which the modern Church professes but does not profoundly
believe nor live by. As shown by Aubrey Moore, Augustine was entirely
sound in counselling the entire separation of these two great lines of
thought, the natural and the spiritual. “It very often happens,” says
Augustine, “that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or
the other elements of this world ... respecting which one who is not a
Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or
observation [that is, a natural philosopher], and it is very disgraceful
and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a
Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian
Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that
the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from
west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.”

Augustine held what may be regarded as a pristine faith in nature as a
manifestation of the divine. This pristine theistic view is founded on
passages in Genesis, especially Genesis 2:15 and Genesis 3:19:

  And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to
  dress it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15.)

  In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto
  the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto
  dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19.)

These passages show that nature, typified by the garden, gives man his
sustenance, and yet, as it has to be won by the sweat of the brow, man’s
energy or art must work with nature. These passages, as Bishop
Boyd-Carpenter observes in his inspiring studies of Dante, are also the
foundation of the famous lines in the “Divine Comedy” in which the poet
expresses the relation between the theistic view of nature and
scientific or philosophical inquiry.

                   ... He thus made reply:
             “Philosophy, to an attentive ear,
             Clearly points out, not in one part alone,
             How imitative Nature takes her course
             From the celestial Mind, and from its art:
             And where her laws[6] the Stagirite unfolds,
             Not many leaves scann’d o’er, observing well,
             Thou shalt discover that your art on her
             Obsequious follows, as the learner treads
             In his instructor’s step; so that your art
             Deserves the name of second in descent
             From God. These two, if thou recall to mind
             Creation’s holy book,[7] from the beginning
             Were the right source of life and excellence
             To humankind....”

The preceding is Cary’s version.[8] Another version of this passage is
that of Longfellow.[9]

           “Philosophy,” he said, “to him who heeds it,
           Noteth, not only in one place alone,
           After what manner Nature takes her course
           From Intellect Divine and from its art;
           And if thy Physics carefully thou notest,
           After not many pages shalt thou find,
           That this your art as far as possible
           Follows, as the disciple doth the master,
           So that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.
           From these two, if thou bringest to thy mind
           Genesis at the beginning, it behooves
           Mankind to gain their life, and to advance.”

As Bishop Boyd-Carpenter remarks, Virgil’s answer to Dante is to this
effect: We learn from philosophy that the operations of nature proceed
directly from God, and those of art indirectly, because art consists in
the imitation of nature. (“Inferno,” XI, pp. 97–105, Longfellow’s
translation.) Again, the Bible teaches us that it is by these two
principles, nature and art, that the system of man’s life should be
ordered. (“Inferno,” XI, pp. 106–108.)

If we are guided by the spirit of Augustine and of Dante we cannot fail
to see that the Church has passed through a very critical period of
scepticism as regards nature. This is perhaps an original view of
scepticism, but there is no way of evading its application; if nature
represents the wisdom and goodness of God, to be blind to its
interpretation is a form of scepticism—devout and well-intentioned
though it may be. Especially the Roman Church has been led away from its
pristine faith in nature as a manifestation of the divine, while the
Protestant Church, in consequence of this loss of faith during the
nineteenth century, has suffered a loss of influence in the world which
it will require a long period to regain. If the laws of nature are
manifestations of the divine power and wisdom, as we proclaim in our
services, the attitude of the Church toward these laws should not be
hesitant, defensive, or apologetic, but active, receptive, and
aggressive.

Considered in this way, the great scientific inquiry of the latter half
of the nineteenth century, so far from being regarded as destructive, is
a constructive, purifying and regenerating movement; it takes us back to
the lost faith of our fathers, a faith which spiritualized the Old
Testament, a faith which finds in nature a manifestation of the divine
order of things. Pasteur showed the way to the physical redemption of
man, as Newton had opened to us the new heavens and Darwin the new
earth. If we were to rewrite the Litany in the twentieth century, for
the passage, “From plague, pestilence, and famine, good Lord, deliver
us,” we should read, “From ignorance of Thy Laws and disobedience of Thy
Commands, good Lord, deliver us.”


From the standpoint of this older teaching of Augustine and Dante the
life-work of Louis Pasteur was more than humanitarian, it was more than
scientific; it was religious. He regarded natural processes which in
their superficial view appear relentless, cruel, wholly inexplicable, as
part of a possibly beneficent order of things; he again revealed through
his profound insight, through his unparalleled toil, discouragement, and
even scorn on the part of his contemporaries, deeper laws, which are
beneficent, protective, and restorative in action. He was the evangelist
of Osler’s “third gospel”: “And the third gospel, the gospel of his
body, which brings man into relation with nature—a true _evangelion_,
the glad tidings of a conquest beside which all others sink into
insignificance—is the final conquest of nature, out of which has come
man’s redemption of man....

“If in the memorable phrase of the Greek philosopher Prodicus, ‘that
which benefits human life is God,’ we may see in this new gospel a link
betwixt us and the crowning race of those who eye to eye shall look on
knowledge, and in whose hand nature shall be an open book, an approach
to the glorious day of which Shelley sings so gloriously:

                                           Happiness
           And Science dawn though late upon the earth;
           Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
           Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
           Reason and passion cease to combat there,
           Whilst mind unfettered o’er the earth extends
           Its all-subduing energies, and wields
           The sceptre of a vast dominion there.”

Should we not institute a new order of sainthood for men like Pasteur?
Could we find one more eminent for consecration, piety, and service in
life and character than this devout investigator? Entrance to this order
would be granted to those who through the study of Nature have extended
the bounds of human knowledge, have bestowed incomparable blessings on
the human race, have relieved human suffering, have saved or prolonged
human life. Would not a statue of Louis Pasteur in the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine proclaim the faith of the modern Church that the two
great historic movements of Love and of Knowledge, of the spiritual and
intellectual and the physical well-being of man, are harmonious parts of
a single and eternal truth? On the base of such a statue might be
inscribed the words written by Pasteur in the most perplexing period of
his life:

  “GOD GRANT THAT BY MY PERSEVERING LABORS I MAY BRING A LITTLE STONE TO
  THE FRAIL AND ILL-ASSURED EDIFICE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THOSE DEEP
  MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND DEATH WHERE ALL OUR INTELLECTS HAVE SO
  LAMENTABLY FAILED.”

[Illustration:

  _From a photograph by Gutekunst_

  JOSEPH LEIDY
]




                              JOSEPH LEIDY
                               1823–1891

  Joseph Leidy may be known as the founder of vertebrate palæontology in
  America, since he followed the pioneers in this branch of science, in
  which America has become so famous, and since he was succeeded by
  Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh. Leidy and Cope were the very
  last representatives in America of the older school of naturalists and
  anatomists, who covered a very broad field. They both covered this
  field with consummate ability. In studying Leidy’s life we observe him
  as a master of detail, whereas Cope was a master of generalization.
  Their devotion to the _École des Faits_ rendered most distinguished
  service to American science.


      JOSEPH LEIDY, FOUNDER OF VERTEBRATE PALÆONTOLOGY IN AMERICA

I ask the indulgence of the members of this gathering in honor of Joseph
Leidy and fellow workers in the fields of science if I present what I
have to say in an informal manner, and I trust that you will not for a
moment imagine that, because it is presented informally, I do not
appreciate the honor conferred upon me in asking me to speak on this
historic occasion in reference to a man for whom I have such great
admiration as for Joseph Leidy. I shall not repeat except in a very
general way the homage that was paid to Leidy in the series of important
and penetrating addresses which we have listened to today, but I shall
endeavor to present a summary, especially along the lines of
palæontology and comparative anatomy, of some of the distinctive
features of his work in comparison with those of the men who accompanied
and immediately followed him, and to show what great results have come
from his efforts as a pioneer and as a founder of this most interesting
and fascinating branch of science in America.

Leidy started with an entirely new world of life; he soon learned that
he could not base his study of American fossils on the work of French
palæontologists, for the life of our western regions was not known in
the Old World. Every specimen represented a new species or a new genus
or a new family, and in some cases a new order. Never was there a
greater opportunity than was offered to Leidy in this virgin field of
our then virgin West. Never was a man more ready to grasp it than that
quiet, unpretentious, unassuming, wonderfully gifted observer of nature.
It is particularly interesting to review his work, which was written in
the exact spirit of Cuvier, and to see his long record of direct
observation of the entire extinct fauna not only of the eastern but,
especially, of the great western territories. We find today how
permanent that work was, how little we have to modify it, how well it
stands the test of time, how accurate are his descriptions, how perfect
his figures and illustrations, and how even today they form admirable
standards for all the work that has been done since. After a continuous
series of epoch-making papers and contributions which he was in the
habit of contributing year after year, in meeting after meeting of the
academy, he brought his initial work to a climax in 1869 when he
published his great monograph, “Extinct Mammalian Fauna of Nebraska and
Dakota.” That work still ranks in breadth and accuracy as the finest
single contribution that has been made to vertebrate palæontology in
this country, if not in the world.

Whereas in Leidy we had a man of the exact observer type, Cope was a man
who loved speculation. If Leidy was the natural successor of Cuvier,
Cope was the natural successor of Lamarck. Leidy, in his contributions
to the academy, covered the whole world of nature, from the Protozoa and
Infusoria up to man, and he lived as the last great naturalist in the
world of the old type who was able by both capacity and training to
cover the whole field of nature. Cope, in contrast, mastered—and this
mastery in itself was a wonderful achievement—the entire domain of
vertebrates from the fishes up. Marsh, with less breadth and less
ability, nevertheless was a palæontologist of a very high order and had
a genius for appreciating what might be called the most important thing
in science. He always knew where to explore, where to seek the
transition stages, and he never lost the opportunity to point out at the
earliest possible moment the most significant fact to be discovered and
disseminated.

It is most interesting to contrast the temperament of these three men,
Joseph Leidy, Edward Drinker Cope, and Othniel Charles Marsh. They were
as different as any three men could possibly be made, both by nature and
nurture. As Professor Edward Smith said, in one of his addresses on
Leidy, “scientists are only mortals after all.” Your scientific genius
may hitch up with a star on the one hand and with an anchor on the
other. Whereas Leidy was essentially a man of peace, Cope was what might
be called a militant palæontologist. Whereas Leidy’s motto was peace at
any price, Cope’s was war whatever it cost. I do not know that I can
find from Shakespeare any characterization of Joseph Leidy, but I think
in “Henry IV” there is a pretty good characterization of my friend
Edward D. Cope:

  I am not yet of Percy’s mind, the Hotspur of the north; he that kills
  me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands,
  and says to his wife, “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.”

Perhaps there was a scientific providence in all this; perhaps such
antagonistic spirits were necessary to enliven and disseminate interest
in this branch of science throughout the country. This subtle combative
quality in a palæontologist is a strange quality; it is a strange
inversion, because the more ancient and difficult the study, the more
refractory the fossil, the greater the animation of discussion regarding
its relationships. From this subtle ferment there arose the famous
rivalry which existed not between Leidy and either of the others,
because it was impossible to quarrel with Leidy, but between Cope, the
descendant of a Quaker family, and Marsh, the nephew of a great
philanthropist. When I took up the subject as a young man and first came
to the City of Brotherly Love I always expected to learn of some fresh
discussion, some recent combat; it was even in the shade of the Academy
of Natural Sciences that one found echoes of these convulsive movements.
I remember one day coming into the dignified halls of the academy and
finding two of the youthful attendants engaged in hot discussion over a
dispute they had overheard at a meeting of the academy the night before.

Leidy, after the characterizations that we have heard of his life from
Conklin, Jennings, Scott and others, occupied a pivotal position, a very
interesting pivotal position. He was in an intellectual environment and
more or less in a social environment entirely different from our own.
This is very important to keep in mind in estimating his work. In spirit
he was, I think, a true pre-Darwinian in the sense of seeking what may
be called facts for Darwin and in the breadth and scope of his
researches. But he lived in an entirely different intellectual
atmosphere from that which surrounds our scientific world of today; he
was a John the Baptist for Charles Darwin. We must remember that twelve
years before Darwin brought forth the “Origin of Species” this young man
was beginning to assemble a mass of data which would have been of great
value to the great British naturalist. As shown by Professor Scott, he
was tracing the ancestral lineage of the horse, the camel, the
rhinoceros, the tapir family, the titanotheres, and last, but not least,
the anatomical forebears of man.

Nevertheless, Leidy was an evolutionist _sub rosa_; he was an
evolutionist without ever using the word evolution. There is no doubt
about that when you read a citation from his writings such as was
selected by Professor Jennings:

  The study of the earth’s crust teaches us that very many species of
  plants and animals became extinct at successive periods, while other
  races originated to occupy their places. This probably was the result,
  in many cases, of a change in exterior conditions incompatible with
  the life of certain species and favorable to the primitive production
  of others.... Living beings did not exist upon the earth prior to
  their indispensable conditions of action, but wherever these have been
  brought into operation concomitantly, the former originated.... Of the
  life, present everywhere with its indispensable conditions, and coeval
  in its origin with them, what was the immediate cause? It could not
  have existed upon earth prior to its essential conditions; and is it,
  therefore, the result of these? There appear to be but trifling steps
  from the oscillating particles of inorganic matter to a bacterium;
  from this to a vibrio, thence to a monas, and so gradually up to the
  highest orders of life! The most ancient rocks containing remains of
  living beings indicate the contemporaneous existence of the more
  complex as well as the simplest of organic forms; but, nevertheless,
  life may have been ushered upon earth, through oceans of the lowest
  types, long previously to the deposit of the oldest palæozoic rocks as
  known to us.

This really is a sketch in 1847 of environment and survival such as we
now know to be the actual course of evolution and was truly anticipatory
of modern results, substituting modern language as we may do for the
quaint phraseology of the period.

On the subject of the evolution of man especially Leidy certainly had
very clear and positive ideas. He caught from Goethe the significance of
the occasional reversion and the embryonic suture between the
premaxillary and maxillary bones—constituting a single bone in the human
subject, two bones in the lower order of mammals. He pointed out this
suture in 1847 in the skull of a native from one of the Hollander
Islands. In 1849 he pointed out the separate embryonic condition of the
intermaxillary bones. In both cases, as was his habit, Leidy obviously
saw the significance but, always sticking to facts and a presentation of
facts, he let the matter rest there. The most pronounced adumbration,
however, of the evolution of man from the primates is to be found in a
citation of his volume of 1873, a period when the descent of man was
still not recognized:

  But little change would be necessary to evolve from the jawbone and
  teeth of _Notharctus_ that of the modern monkey. The same condition
  that would lead to the suppression of a first premolar tooth in
  continuance would reduce the fangs of the other premolars to a single
  one. This change with the common teeth shortening and the increase of
  the depth of the jaw would give the character of the living South
  American monkey. A further reduction would give rise to the condition
  of the jaw in the Old World apes and in man.

I do not need to point out that the human jaw, next to the human
forehead, is the most significant feature in the transformation from the
lower to the higher primates. But some of those here present may not
know that a monograph has been written by my successor and colleague,
Professor William K. Gregory, upon the genus _Notharctus_ Leidy.
Gregory, fifty years after this significant passage was written by
Leidy, chose _Notharctus_ as an ideal intermediate type to place in a
theoretic ancestral series leading up to man, and in the beautiful
series of preparations which he has recently completed showing the
development of the human face in all stages from the most remote
ancestral facial type to the modern human face, Gregory uses
_Notharctus_ as the pivotal point, just as did Leidy fifty years ago.

To return to the matter of Leidy’s intellectual environment: how much we
owe today to our intellectual environment, how much we owe to battles
which have been fought and won over insufficient evidence! Not battles
of words, but battles of facts. Such evidence as that of _Notharctus_
the alert vision of Leidy detected and put in its proper place. In those
days “mum” was the word as regards evolution. Neither Cuvier nor Owen,
the British successor of Cuvier, nor Louis Agassiz, great naturalists
all, had accepted the theory; theologic influence was still
all-powerful. Fortunately for Leidy, William Jennings Bryan was still in
embryo. Trying to form an historic parallel of William Jennings Bryan, I
think it may be found in the figure of King Canute sitting with his
court on the shores of Nature, trying to beat back the waves of Truth.
If Leidy had lived in the era of Bryan, he undoubtedly would have been
classified with Professor Conklin and myself—he would have been made
with us a type of a new genus, _Anathema maranatha_, in which, according
to the zoology of Bryan, are embraced “tall professors coming down out
of trees who would push good people not believing in evolution off the
sidewalk.” Leidy would not have been burned at the stake, only because
of legal obstacles. Similarly, I think that Professor Conklin and myself
owe our lives to the fact that _autos da fé_ in matters of belief are no
longer matters of common practice in our civilization!

It is perhaps particularly fitting that Professor Scott and myself were
asked to speak at this centenary, for one reason above others. We have
been the defendants and supporters of the Leidy tradition. I am not
quite sure, but I doubt if you will find in the writings of Professor
Cope or Professor Marsh a single allusion to the work of Leidy. I make
this statement subject to verification, but I do not recall in their
writings a single allusion to the work of Leidy, except a brief tribute
by Marsh in an early address; the rivalry between the two men went to
such lengths that in their race with each other Leidy was totally
forgotten. Every new animal that was discovered was given a new
scientific name by each of them. _Notharctus_ Leidy, for example, is
exactly the same animal as _Tomitherium_ Cope and _Limnotherium_ Marsh.
Thus arose a trinominal system—three names each for the Eocene and
Oligocene animals—the original Leidy name and the Cope and Marsh names.
It has been the painful duty of Professor Scott and myself to devote
thirty of the best years of our lives trying to straighten out this
nomenclatural chaos. Even to this day we are verifying the observations
of Leidy; we find that he never made an incorrect observation or
published an incorrect figure; his accuracy in these regards is one of
his greatest and most permanent claims to immortality as a
palæontologist.

I do not know that I altogether agree with my friend Conklin in his
address as to the relation of extensive and intensive work. If I
understand him aright, he rather implies that intensive work is an
inevitable feature of modern scientific progress. I would rather cite
Leidy as an example of a man who pursued intensive work and extensive
work simultaneously and who had the capacity to pursue intensive work in
several branches of science, biological and geological, and I would
regard the permanence of Leidy’s work as largely the result of the state
of mind produced by the breadth of his intensive as well as of his
extensive work. I would like to leave on your minds my conviction,
buttressed by Leidy’s life, that it will be necessary even for those of
our day to maintain the Leidy attitude, because, after all, it is in
_the single mind that great hypotheses and theories are generated_. The
comparative anatomist, if he dies out, will leave human anatomy
impoverished. Today our students should return to the Leidy attitude, as
Professor Scott said, of entering palæontology by way of medicine and
base our education in human anatomy, as Leidy did, on a broad knowledge
of comparative anatomy. This is only one instance out of very many that
might be given of the legacies of Leidy to us: namely, that throughout
his life his mind had continuously the intensive as well as the
extensive attitude. He was able to be on the mountain-top and then
descend into the valley, and I believe that while some men who pursue
one subject intensively all their lives are making great discoveries,
for example, such workers as Professor Michelson, whom we all honor, the
chances are that few men can make great discoveries unless they approach
the subject broadly and work from more than one angle of thought.

Speaking of immortality, I share rather the Leidy view than the view of
Cope. I wish it were possible to resurrect Joseph Leidy and to bring him
back into the field of modern American palæontology. I wish it were
possible to bring him back to life and to have taken him with me, for
example, in a motorcar across the wastes of Mongolia. I can imagine the
joy with which he would have welcomed coming upon the remains of the
land dinosaurs, recalling his first description of a dinosaur in
America, in the very heart of the great Desert of Gobi; and perhaps the
still greater joy with which he would have greeted one of his
titanotheres, one of the first mammals which he described from Wyoming,
out on a great plain on the border of the Desert of Gobi.

The desire for this kind of immortality reminds me often of the Greek
poet:

            To live like man and yet like nature to endure,
            That double gift, to man and nature both denied,
            The Gods alone enjoy.

We are rewriting this beautiful Greek verse in the immortality of
Leidy’s work, and we are holding up his example for the prevailing
spirit of truthfulness, which is, after all, its most characteristic
single feature. Would that Leidy and Huxley and Richard Owen and Cuvier
and Marsh and Cope could see the heights which have been reached in the
branch of science to which they devoted their lives and fortunes.
Leidy’s infant science, in which it was most hazardous to make
predictions, has now reached the stage which I believe is the finest in
the history of any science—the stage of prediction—that, as astronomers
have predicted the existence of unknown and unseen planets,
palæontologists can also predict unknown and unseen forms of life and,
moreover, can point out where they may be found.

Is our palæontological path reaching its goal? I think not. Its final
goal will be reached when palæontologists are able through extensive and
intensive methods to join hands with workers in other biological fields
and when we are able, pursuing our branch in the Leidy spirit, to bring
together into one harmony—the harmony which certainly exists, although
at present we do not see it—by bringing together into one harmony the
great underlying principle, the multiple aspects of which we can sum up
in the word “evolution.”

[Illustration:

  _From a photograph by Gutekunst_

  EDWARD DRINKER COPE
]




                          EDWARD DRINKER COPE
                               1840–1897

  Undoubtedly the most brilliant palæontologist of America and one of
  the most brilliant scientists America has produced. This biography
  fittingly follows that of Joseph Leidy, although there is the greatest
  possible contrast between the life and works of the two men: Cope,
  brilliant, daring, combative; Leidy, patient, persistent, cautious,
  conservative. It was a contrast between the temperamental Gaelic and
  the stable Teutonic type. The work of both men will endure for all
  time. That of Cope requires constant emendation and revision, but it
  leaves a firm and broad foundation for our knowledge of the evolution
  of the vertebrata. Leidy was a master of detail, of accurate
  description, of finished workmanship, rarely venturing generalization,
  but he left a treasure-house of splendidly collected facts.

  The work of Professor Cope began in 1859, a most favorable year, when
  comparative anatomy first felt the impetus of Darwin’s “Origin of
  Species.” He was then only nineteen, and for thirty-eight years
  thereafter his active genius hastened our progress in the knowledge
  and classification of all the great divisions of the vertebrata. He
  passed away on April 12, 1897, at the age of fifty-seven, in the full
  vigor of his intellectual powers, leaving a large part of his work
  incomplete. Almost at the last he contributed several reviews to _The
  American Naturalist_, and on the Tuesday preceding his death he sent
  to the press the Syllabus of his lectures before the University of
  Pennsylvania, containing his latest opinions regarding the arrangement
  and evolution of the vertebrata.


                           A GREAT NATURALIST

Edward Drinker Cope was born in Philadelphia July 28, 1840, of
distinguished American ancestry. His grandfather, Caleb Cope, was the
staunch Quaker of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who protected Major André
from mob violence. Thomas Pim Cope, his grandfather, founded the house
of Cope Brothers, famous in the early mercantile annals of Philadelphia.
His father, Alfred, the junior member of the firm, was a man of very
active intellect and showed rare judgment in Edward’s education.

Together the father and son became brisk investigators, the father
stimulating by questions and by travel the strong love of nature and of
natural objects which the son showed at an unusually early age. In
August, 1857, they took a sea voyage to Boston, and the son’s journal is
full of drawings of jellyfish, grampuses, and other natural objects seen
by the way. When eight and a half years old he made his first visit to
the Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences, “on the 21st day of the
10th Mo., 1848,” as entered in his journal. He brought away careful
drawings, measurements, and descriptions of several larger birds, but
especially the figure of the entire skeleton of an ichthyosaur, with
this quaint memorandum: “Two of the sclerotic plates look at the
eye—thee will see these in it.” At the age of ten he was taken upon a
longer voyage to the West Indies. It is not improbable that these
voyages exerted a lasting influence upon him.

The principal impression he gave in boyhood was of incessant activity in
mind and body, of quick and ingenious thought, reaching in every
direction for knowledge, and of great independence in character and
action. It is evident that he owed far more to the direct study of
nature and to his own impulses as a young investigator than to the five
or six years of formal education which he received at school. He was
especially fond of map drawing and of geographical studies. His natural
talent for languages may have been cultivated in some degree by his
tutor, Dr. Joseph Thomas, an excellent linguist, editor of a
biographical dictionary. Many of his spare winter hours were passed at
the Academy of Natural Sciences. After the age of thirteen the summer
intervals of boarding-school life and later of tutoring were filled
among the woods, fields, and streams of Chester County, Pennsylvania,
where an intimate knowledge of birds was added to that of batrachians,
reptiles, and insects. He showed a particular fondness for snakes. One
of these excursions, taken at the age of nineteen, is described in a
letter to his cousin (dated June 24, 1859), in which, at the close of a
charming description of the botany of the region, appears his discovery
of a new type:

  I traced the stream for a very considerable distance upon the rocky
  hillside, my admiration never ceasing, but I finally turned off into
  the woods towards some towering rocks. Here I actually got to
  searching for salamanders and was rewarded by capturing two specimens
  of species which I never saw before alive. The first (_Spelerpes
  longicauda_) is a great rarity here. I am doubtful of its having been
  previously noted in Chester County. Its length is 6 inches, of which
  its tail forms nearly four. The color is deep brownish yellow thickly
  spotted with black, which becomes confluent on the tail, thus forming
  bands. To me a very interesting animal—the type of the genus
  _Spelerpes_, and consequently of the subfamily _Spelerpinæ_, which I
  attempted to characterize in a paper published in the _Proceedings of
  the Academy of Natural Sciences_. I send thee a copy, with the request
  that thee will neither mention nor show it,[10] for—however trifling—I
  would doubtless be miserably annoyed by some if thee should. Nobody in
  this country (or in Europe, of _ours_) knows anything about
  salamanders, but Professor Baird and thy humble coz., that is, in some
  respects. Rusconi, the only man who has observed their method of
  reproduction, has written enough to excite greatly one’s curiosity and
  not fully satisfy it. With suitable appliances of aquariums, etc., I
  should like to make some observations. The other salamander I caught
  was _Plethodon glutinosum_—the young—remarkable for the great number
  of teeth that lie together in two patches on the “basisphenoid” bone;
  about 300 or more.

Another passage gives an insight into his strong opinion, so often
expressed afterward, as to what constitutes the real pleasures of life:

  Pleasant it is, too, to find one whose admiration of nature and detail
  is heightened, not chilled, by the necessary “investigation”—which, in
  my humble opinion, is one of the most useful as well as pleasing
  exercises of the intellect, in the circle of human study. How many are
  there who are delighted with a “fine view,” but who seldom care to
  think of the mighty and mysterious agency that reared the hills, of
  the wonderful structure and growth of the forests that crown them, or
  of the complicated mechanism of the myriads of higher organisms that
  abound everywhere; who would see but little interesting in a fungus,
  and who would shrink with affected horror from a defenseless toad.

Having passed six summers among the woods and streams of Chester County,
Pennsylvania, it is not surprising to find him, at the time this letter
was written, perfectly familiar with the plants, birds, snakes, and
salamanders of eastern Pennsylvania, and perfectly aware of the rarity
of such knowledge. His range extended with astonishing rapidity; first
among the living reptiles and amphibians; then among living and
palæozoic fishes; then among the great extinct reptiles of New Jersey
and the Rocky Mountains; finally among the ancient American quadrupeds.
He acquired in turn a masterly knowledge of each type. Irreverent toward
old systems, eager and ambitious to replace them by new ones of his own,
with unbounded powers of hard work, whether in the field or at his desk,
he rapidly became a leading spirit among the workers in the great realm
of the backboned creation, both in America and Europe. While inferior in
logic, he showed Huxley’s unerring vision of the most distinctive
feature in a group of animals, as well as the broad grasp of Cuvier and
of Cuvier’s famous English disciple, Owen. While most men of our day are
able to specialize among the details of an order, or at most of a class,
Cope, at the age of thirty-four, had in his mental horizon at once the
five great classes, although since Owen’s time they had been greatly
expanded by palæontological discovery. He was thus the last and most
distinguished representative of the old school of comparative
anatomists. His high pressure of thirty-eight years’ work was not
consistent with excelling accuracy. We have often to look behind the
returns in using Cope’s work. Yet if it lacks German exactness, French
beauty of presentation, and the solidity which marks the best English
scientific workmanship, its dominant principles are sound and its chief
anatomical generalizations will endure longer than those of either Owen
or Cuvier.

With this peculiar fitness for great studies came first the glorious
opportunity of entering the unknown western field as a pioneer with
Marsh and Leidy. In 1866 he was the first to find along the New Jersey
coast remains of the leaping dinosaur, _Lælaps aquilunguis_, and he
anticipated Huxley in comparing these reptiles with the birds. In 1871
he extended his explorations westward into what is now the most arid
portion of Kansas, among the remains of the ancient marine monsters, the
ram-nosed mosasaur and the sea-serpent, or elasmosaur. Following up the
rapid advance of government exploration in the Rocky Mountains between
1872 and 1878, he discovered in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming the
great amphicœlias, the gigantic camarasaurus, and the frill-necked
dinosaur agathaumas. As a pioneer in exploration among these giant
animals he was obliged to draw his conclusions largely from fragmentary
and imperfect materials, leaving the field open to Professor Marsh’s
more exhaustive explorations, which were supported by the government.
Yet Professor Cope illuminated the incomplete fragments with his
reasoning and his fertile imagination. When a bone came into his hands,
his first step was to turn it over and over, to comprehend its form
thoroughly, and to compare it with its nearest ally, then to throw out a
conjecture as to its uses and its relation to the life economy of the
animal as a whole. One often found him virtually living in the past,
vividly picturing to himself the muddy shores of the Permian seas of
Texas, where the fin-back lizards basked, or the great fresh-water
expanses of Wyoming and Montana, where the dinosaurs wandered. His
conclusions as to the habits and modes of locomotion of these animals,
often so grotesque as to excite laughter, were suggestive revivals from
the vast deeps of time of the muscular and nervous life which once
impelled the mighty bones. It is fortunate that some of this imaginative
history has been written down by Mr. Ballou and that, although
physically enfeebled by a mortal illness, Professor Cope in his last
days was able to convey to Mr. Knight, the artist, his impressions of
how these ancient saurians lived and moved.

The second feature of his opportunity was, of course, that this pioneer
exploration came early in the age of Darwinism, when missing links, not
only in human ancestry, but in the greater chain of backboned animals,
were at the highest premium. Thus he was fortunate in recording the
discovery in northwestern New Mexico of by far the oldest quadrupeds
known, in finding among these the most venerable monkey, in describing
to the world hundreds of links—in fact, whole chains—of descent between
the most ancient quadrupeds and what we please to call the higher types,
especially the horses, camels, tapirs, dogs, and cats. He labored
successfully to connect the reptiles with the amphibians and the latter
with the fishes, and was as quick as a flash to detect in the paper of
another author the oversight of some long-sought link which he had been
awaiting. Thus in losing him we have lost our ablest and most discerning
critic. No one has made such profuse and overwhelming demonstration of
the actual historical working of the laws of evolution, his popular
reputation perhaps resting most widely upon his practical and
speculative studies in evolution.

Many friends in this country and abroad have spoken of the invigorating
nature of his companionship. A life of intense activity, harassed for
long periods by many difficulties and obstacles, many of them of his own
making, was nevertheless wholly without worry, that destroyer of the
mind so common in our country. His half-century’s enjoyment of research,
extending from his seventh to his fifty-seventh year, can only be
described in its effects upon him as buoyant; it lifted him far above
disturbance by the ordinary matters of life, above considerations of
physical comfort and material welfare, and animated him with a serene
confidence in the rewards which Science extends to her votaries. He
exemplified the truth of the words which Peacock puts into the
meditation of Asterius:

  ... while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course,
  affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid—to maturity, calm
  and grateful occupation—to old age, the most pleasing recollections
  and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and
  while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the
  intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself
  independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of
  human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His
  days are always too short for his enjoyment; ennui is a stranger to
  his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices
  to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing
  and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.

While working at Cope’s museum-residence at Philadelphia, I have had
many queer experiences in the odd, half-Bohemian restaurants which the
naturalist frequented. The quality of the meal was a secondary
consideration to him, provided it afforded sufficient brain fuel. While
eating he always relaxed into pure fun and displayed a large fund of
amusing anecdotes of the experiences, mishaps, and frailties of
scientists, his own as often as those of others. He worked deliberately
and gave his whole mind to one subject at a time, if he considered it of
special importance, this power being aided by his remarkable memory of
species and of objects long laid aside for future reference. In his
field exploration his scientific enthusiasm burned still higher in
pursuit of an unknown type or a missing link. Neither horses nor men
could keep pace with his indefatigable energy. Heat and alkali-water
were totally disregarded. From one of his Bitter Creek Desert trips he
returned to Fort Bridger completely exhausted and for weeks was
prostrated with fever. Only a short time before his death he laughingly
related that after a solemn warning by a physician to avoid horse-back
riding and exposure to water, his health had been greatly improved in
the course of a summer by three hundred miles’ exercise in the saddle in
North Dakota and several weeks’ wading in New Jersey swamps. His house
in Pine Street became every year a greater curiosity as the accumulating
fossils, books, and pamphlets outtaxed the shelves and began to thicken
like stratified deposits upon the floor in dust-laden walls and lanes.
Even his sleeping-room was piled to the ceiling, and he closed his eyes
for the last time while lying upon a bed surrounded on three sides by
the loved objects of his life-work.

The most conspicuous feature of Cope’s character from boyhood upward was
independence; this was partly the secret of his venturesome and
successful assaults upon all traditional but defective systems of
classification. Seldom has a face reflected a character more fully than
that of Professor Cope. His square and prominent forehead suggested his
vigorous intellect and marvelous memory; his brilliant eyes were the
media of exceptional keenness of observation; his prominent chin was in
traditional harmony with his aggressive spirit. From this rare
combination of qualities so essential to free investigation sprang his
scientific genius, and, with exceptional facilities of wealth and
culture in his early education, he became a great naturalist—certainly
the greatest America has produced.

As a comparative anatomist he ranks both in the range and effectiveness
of knowledge and ideas with Cuvier and Owen. When we consider the short
life of some of the favorite generalizations of these great men he may
well prove to be their superior as a philosophical anatomist. His work,
while inferior in style of presentation, has another quality, which
distinguishes that of Huxley, namely, its clear and immediate perception
of the most essential or distinctive features in a group of animals. As
a natural philosopher, while far less logical than Huxley, he was more
creative and constructive, his metaphysics ending in theism rather than
in agnosticism.

Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist. After Huxley he was
the last representative of the old broad-gauge school of anatomists, and
he is only to be compared with members of that school. His life-work
bears the marks of great genius, of solid and accurate observation as
well as of inaccuracy due to bad logic or haste and overpressure of
work. Although the greater number of his Natural Orders and Natural Laws
will remain as permanent landmarks in our science, a large part of his
systematic work will require laborious revision and thus is far from
standing as a model to the young zoologist.

Appreciation of greatness is a mark of the civilization and culture of a
people. Cope’s monumental work, preserved in thousands of notes, short
papers, and memoirs, and in three bulky government quartos, constitutes
his assurance of enduring fame. Some of his countrymen, and even of his
fellow workers, allowed certain of his characteristics to obscure his
stronger side in their estimate of him and his work, and during his life
he received few of the honors such as foreigners are wont to bestow upon
their countrymen of note. When we think more deeply of what really
underlies human progress, we realize that only to a few men with the
light of genius is it given to push the world’s human thought along, and
that Edward Drinker Cope was one of these men.

[Illustration:

  _From a photograph copyright by Underwood and Underwood_

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT
]




                           THEODORE ROOSEVELT
                               1858–1919

  In his early life Roosevelt was a warm friend and companion of my
  naturalist brother, Frederick. During the last ten years of his life I
  became very intimate with him, especially after the writing of my “Age
  of Mammals” in 1910, which he read with ardor. Recalling his
  experiences as Police Commissioner of the City of New York, in writing
  to me of this book he said he enjoyed comparing certain politicians
  with whom he was thrown with the hyænodons and certain less desirable
  animal citizens of the Tertiary age! It was perhaps this running
  parallel between human nature and animal nature which grew on his mind
  and caused him to seek my advice when invited to prepare and deliver
  the Romanes Lecture at Oxford, which he entitled “Biological Analogies
  in History.” He was more kinds of a man than any one I have ever
  known—that is, able in more lines.

  In this “Impression” I endeavor to show that the scientific side of
  Roosevelt’s life is to be taken seriously; that he had unusual ability
  as a naturalist and observer, which would have led to a distinguished
  career in science had he not been turned to government. Above all
  things he desired to be truthful and strictly accurate, and he took
  infinite pains not to exaggerate but to present the real facts.


                           THEODORE ROOSEVELT
                               NATURALIST

       “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.”
                                                     —ROOSEVELT.

Theodore Roosevelt doubtless inherited his natural history bent from his
father, who was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History in
the year 1869. I had the good fortune to recall young Theodore in his
boyhood, because of no life may it more truly be said that “the child is
father of the man.” He was one of a youthful band of bird-lovers,
observers and collectors, among whom was my brother Frederick, who came
together in the seventies. While Frederick confined himself to birds,
Theodore was interested also in mammals and small amphibians, and he
came back from their collecting trips with all kinds of specimens.
Frederick invited Theodore to collect birds with him in the forests of
the Hudson River highlands, and on one occasion, when every pocket was
full of specimens, Theodore suddenly discovered what he believed to be a
new species of frog. Having no other place for it, he put it on top of
his head and clapped on his hat. Things went very well until the boys
happened to meet the Honorable Hamilton Fish, then Secretary of State,
taking his dignified afternoon drive along the Hudson with Mrs. Fish. Of
course both boys doffed their hats, whereupon Theodore’s frog, tired of
confinement, made a spring forward! That the youthful collector
recovered and replaced the frog as soon as the Secretary’s carriage was
out of sight illustrates one of Roosevelt’s great characteristics as a
naturalist—to collect at all hazards, at any amount of personal
inconvenience. Like the young Darwin, who brought back a species of bug
in his mouth because he had no more space in his pocket, the boy
Roosevelt never let an opportunity pass and finally became one of the
greatest of American collectors. In a letter to me dated December 9,
1914, he wrote:

  My memory is that I was one of the group who founded the Linnæan
  Society, although it was then a very small society and my part was
  humble and inconspicuous. As a boy I worked in the museum and
  specifically remember skinning some rather reddish white-footed mice
  which I thought were golden mice and was much disappointed to find
  that they were not. Fred and I worked under Bell and sometimes visited
  the museum together and did work there. Bell’s shop was down town on
  Broadway. I remember very well once being allowed to look over a large
  number of South American mice in the museum when I was a small boy and
  appealing to Mr. Bickmore to know how I could get at the relationship
  of the South American mice with our northern mice of the same family.
  Fred and I did much about the same kind of work but I was much more
  interested than he was in the book part of it.

Roosevelt’s boyish collection of birds led to his initial training under
Bell, a well-known taxidermist of New York at that time, and, still more
unusual, to his discovery of a new species of bird and the preparation
of his first scientific paper describing it.[11] This illustrates
another characteristic, which is lacking in many naturalists, namely,
the desire to publish as promptly as possible and to lose not a precious
moment of time in getting ready for the next publication. This
characteristic finally made Theodore Roosevelt a voluminous writer on
natural history in the last two decades of his life. During his ranching
experience he was constantly observing the western game mammals and he
made extensive contributions to our knowledge of their habits and
distribution. Birds were his first love, and by far the most thorough
knowledge which he displayed was in the field of ornithology; he knew
not only the birds and their songs but also all their scientific names.
Lord Grey, in an address to the Harvard students, verified this
statement of Roosevelt’s unusual knowledge of birds, British as well as
American. Walking through the New Forest together they observed upward
of thirty species of birds, each of which Theodore Roosevelt knew by
familiar and scientific name, recognizing many of them by what he had
read of their songs.

Among extinct animals, in which I am especially interested, Roosevelt
was not an original observer, but he was a voracious reader of
everything worth while written about them and soon became extremely well
informed. In this connection I recall an amusing and characteristic
incident. Receiving an invitation to deliver one of the Romanes Lectures
at Oxford—perhaps the greatest lectureship of the kind in the
world—Roosevelt wrote to me, as follows, for advice as to whether he
could do it and should do it:

  I have just received from Lord Curzon, the Chancellor of Oxford, a
  request to deliver the Romanes Lecture at any time I see fit. I shall
  probably accept for the spring that I get out of Africa on my way back
  to the United States. It seems to me worth while for me to do so.
  Doesn’t it seem so to you? It is a lecture which has been delivered by
  Gladstone, Huxley, John Morley, Bryce, and other men of that stamp.

I replied in the affirmative on both questions and he immediately wrote
back that he would prepare the lecture on condition that I would read it
over and make corrections, since it was my peculiar field of work. At
that time he was President of the United States, nearing the end of his
term and engaged in a tremendous struggle with both the Senate and the
House, on which for the time he had apparently lost his hold. This
political preoccupation, however, did not prevent his preparing three
very important addresses which he had been asked to deliver, in Berlin,
in Paris, and that above mentioned in Oxford.

In a relatively short time I received the manuscript of his Romanes
Lecture. It was full of analogies between the extinct animal kingdom and
the kingdoms and principalities of the human world, in which he compared
one moribund government in Europe to the _Megatherium_ and another that
had ceased to progress about three centuries ago to the _Glyptodon_! I
drew heavy blue pencil lines across these pages, with the word “omit” in
the margin, and wrote: “I have left out certain passages that are likely
to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred
to.” It developed later that the expurgated passages were quite dear to
the author, but in keeping with his character he thanked me warmly and
assured me that

  I have profited by your advice to at once change what I said about the
  Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, and I think I now have it so that no
  legitimate offense can be taken. But you rather frighten me by
  speaking of the importance which you say will be attached to my
  speech. I am speaking purely as a layman and as a private citizen, and
  when I accepted the invitation it never occurred to me that any more
  importance would be attached to what I said than, for instance, to
  what Curzon or Bryce said in their lectures.

Shortly afterward, at a White House luncheon, I was surprised when
President Roosevelt informed the entire table that I had been reviewing
his Romanes Lecture and softening some of his favorite war-provoking
passages. I had already read the manuscript twice, but I told him I
would be glad to look it over again. I shall never forget his reply;
with a broad sweep of his hand, ending with his fist on the luncheon
table, he said:

  No, I am not going to touch that lecture again. I shall put it away,
  send it to London, and entirely dismiss it from my mind until I take
  the train for Oxford—that Romanes Lecture is finished!

He kept this resolution and instead of taking the manuscript of his
three great European addresses with him, as other authors would have
done, he went to Africa with only the Dark Continent in his mind. This
was one of the secrets of his extraordinary success, namely, his power
to concentrate all his thought and energy for the time being on a single
object.

Some years after Roosevelt’s return from Africa and his triumphal tour
of Europe, including the reception at Oxford, in conversation with the
Archbishop of York our talk turned on Theodore Roosevelt and this
Romanes Lecture of 1910. Said His Grace: “I heard Roosevelt, and in the
way of grading which we have at Oxford we agreed to mark the lecture
‘beta minus’ but the lecturer ‘alpha plus.’ While we felt that the
lecture was not a very great contribution to science we were sure that
the lecturer was a very great man, to be ranked in the plus A class.
After the lecture Colonel Roosevelt asked me how I liked it. I may have
expressed rather qualified admiration and seeing my hesitation he said:
‘Well, that lecture would have been a great deal stronger had not one of
my scientific friends in America _blue-penciled the best part of it_.’”

While perhaps strongest in his knowledge of birds, Theodore Roosevelt
also gained an extraordinary knowledge of mammals, especially of North
America and of Africa. In preparing for his African trip he called upon
me for all the books I could supply from the Osborn Library in the
American Museum, which in many respects is one of the most complete in
the country, if not in the world. For several weeks he consumed five
books a week, sitting up to the small hours of the morning to complete
his reading or until Mrs. Roosevelt insisted upon his retiring. Thus in
the course of a few weeks he had read all that had been written about
the great mammals of Africa from Sclater to Selous. He read so rapidly
that it did not seem possible that he could absorb it all, yet when we
gathered at Sagamore Hill to talk over his expedition—a group of the
very best naturalists familiar with African life whom he could get
together for luncheon—he displayed a knowledge of the genera and species
and of the precise localities where each might be found which was equal
or superior to that of any man in the room. To cite only one instance of
his marvelous memory and of his thoroughness of preparation: a question
arose as to the locality of a particular subspecies, Grevy’s zebra
(_Equus grevyi foai_). Roosevelt went to the map, pointed out directly
the particular and only spot where it could be found and said that he
thought the expedition could not possibly get down in that direction.

Equipped with this knowledge and aided by three or four exceptional men
like Heller and Akeley, he conducted, under the auspices of the
Smithsonian Institution, by far the most successful expedition that has
ever penetrated Africa, the chief collections from which are now housed
in our National Museum in Washington, a few fine specimens coming to the
American Museum. Not content with his magazine articles in _Scribner’s_
about the African trip, Roosevelt set to work with Heller and wrote one
of the finest books we have, “African Game Trails,” a volume replete
from cover to cover with accurate, original information—in fact, a real
contribution.

Roosevelt’s return from Africa and triumphal progress through Germany,
France, and England, which reached a climax in the boisterous welcome he
received in the avenues of New York, left his personality utterly
untouched by a trace of vanity. A few days afterward, at a very quiet
lunch at the Museum, I spoke of the great opportunity afforded by the
detachment of his life in Africa to gain a true perspective of his life
and career, such as it is impossible to gain in the crowded conditions
of the modern world. I shall always remember his gesture and reply.
Partly raising his hands in front of his face, as if to shut out the
inner vision, he said, “I never want to look at or think about myself.”

In the many conversations and conferences which we enjoyed together and
in the correspondence of the succeeding years, the impression which
Roosevelt made upon me was one of innate modesty, of full consciousness
of the limitations of his powers and of sincere deference to the
opinions of more experienced men, especially in his own beloved field of
natural history. The same desire to be accurate and to be right
displayed in the preparation of his Romanes Lecture reappeared from time
to time in the submission of his opinions and theories to other
naturalists.

Perhaps the finest illustration of his lack of self-deception came out
in a private testimonial dinner given him by his friend Robert Collier.
The dinner was by far the most brilliant one of the kind I have ever
attended; the guests came from various parts of the country and included
only his warm personal friends and admirers. When it came Roosevelt’s
turn to speak he leaned forward, resting both closed hands on the table
after the manner of Clemenceau, and spoke very quietly, with the utmost
simplicity and directness, expressing with brief candor his own feelings
regarding his reception abroad and at home. Briefly rehearsing his
experiences abroad, he said that he was far more gratified by his
reception at home and welcome to America than by any of the acclamation
he had received abroad. Then, lowering his voice and his head, he
continued:

  But, my friends—you all are my friends—I am not deceived for one
  moment. I know the American people; they have a way of erecting a
  triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he
  may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment!
  Yes, my friends, I am having a bully time. I am swimming on the very
  crest of the wave and enjoying it immensely, but I am not for a moment
  deceived; next week or next month I may be again in the trough of the
  wave, but I assure you I shall be swimming just as hard and enjoying
  life just as much as I now am.

None of his friends at that time believed that such a prophecy could
possibly be realized, yet it came true with amazing suddenness. Within a
few weeks his name had apparently left the headlines for good; it
appeared only in small type in brief paragraphs on inside pages. To the
superficial observer, to those who did not know the real Roosevelt and
his powers of resilience his career was ended.

The lull in publicity gave him the quiet he needed to devote to three
volumes of natural history and to prepare for his last and altogether
greatest period of exploration. His manifold ability and the marked
characteristics of his multiple personality came out in the course of
his plans for the great expedition to South America projected in the
spring of 1913 and executed between October, 1913, and June, 1914. He
had selected an unknown and particularly dangerous region, where the
native tribes had never been thoroughly subdued by the Brazilian
government. He marked out this region as his first choice for a South
American expedition. I sent word to him through our mutual friend, Frank
M. Chapman, that I would never consent to his going to this particular
region under the American Museum flag, that I would not assume even part
of the responsibility for his entering such a dangerous country and not
returning alive. With a smile he sent back to me through Chapman a
characteristic reply:

  Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any
  nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is
  necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready
  to do so.

Although more prudent plans prevailed and we finally determined upon a
route which resulted in the discovery of the Rio Roosevelt, yet the
exposure, the excessively moist climate, the dearth of food, clothing
and supplies, and the malarial infection very nearly cost Roosevelt his
life. There is no doubt that the hazard of the trip meant nothing to
him. While never reckless, he was absolutely fearless. His plans were
made with the utmost intelligence and thoroughness, and with the trained
assistance of his son Kermit, the South American experience and stalwart
courage of George K. Cherrie, and the devoted companionship of Colonel
Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and Leo E. Miller, he led the most
important expedition that has ever gone from North into South America.
As a result of this expedition through Paraguay and the wilderness of
Brazil more than 450 mammal and 1375 bird specimens were added to the
American Museum collections, in addition to the geographic results,
which aroused such a chorus of discussion and diversity of opinion.
Roosevelt was so impressed with the importance of continuing the
exploration that on his return he personally contributed two thousand
dollars from his literary earnings to send his companion naturalists
back to the field.

An American statesman, who should have known better, once characterized
Roosevelt as “one who knew a little about more things than any one else
in this country.” This gives an entirely false impression of Roosevelt’s
mind, which was of quite the contrary order. What Roosevelt did know in
history and in natural history he knew thoroughly; he went to the very
bottom of things, if possible, and no one was more conscientious than he
where his knowledge was limited or merely that of the intelligent
layman. His thorough research in preparing for the African and South
American expeditions was not that of the amateur or of the sportsman but
of the trained naturalist who desires to learn as much as possible from
previous students and explorers.

The State of New York will erect a splendid memorial to Theodore
Roosevelt the Naturalist and Explorer which will perpetuate the
idealistic and courageous aspects of his character and life as a
naturalist. It will adjoin the American Museum of Natural History, which
he loved and which inspired him to the activities of his youth and his
mature years, where he sought the companionship of men of kindred
ambitions and to which he repaired, in the intervals of politics and of
pressing duties of every kind, for keen and concentrated discussions on
animal coloration, the geographic distribution of mammals and birds, the
history of human races, evolution of special groups of animals, and the
furtherance of his expeditions. The memorial will remind boys and girls
of all generations of Americans of Theodore Roosevelt’s spirit of
self-effacement, of love, of zeal, of fearlessness, of energy, of
intelligence with which they should approach nature in all of its
wonderful aspects.

[Illustration:

  JOHN BURROUGHS—JUNE, 1896
]




                             THE TWO JOHNS

                             JOHN BURROUGHS
                               1837–1919

                               JOHN MUIR
                               1838–1914

  “The two Johns,” as they were affectionately known by their comrades
  on the Harriman Expedition to Alaska, were alike in their Christian
  names, in their love of nature, and, to a certain extent, in their
  powers of expression, but they were profoundly different in every
  other respect. I had the privilege of knowing John Muir much more
  intimately than I knew John Burroughs. I learned through
  correspondence and through long and intimate conversations thoroughly
  to understand his Scotch soul, which had a strong Norse element in it
  and a moral fervor drawn from the Bible of the Covenanters. It is
  interesting to contrast this Scotch type of soul with the English type
  of soul seen in John Burroughs.

  I had in mind for some time this idea of the racial soul as something
  more profound in its influence than either the racial temperament or
  the racial mind. If the body had a long history in the past, so has
  the soul of man. In reading Wordsworth’s noble “Ode on the Intimations
  of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” it flashed
  across my mind that along an entirely different path I had reached the
  same conclusion as Wordsworth: namely, that the human soul is full of
  reminiscences and that it responds to conditions and experiences long
  bygone.


                   THE RACIAL SOUL OF JOHN BURROUGHS

Indelibly stamped on my mind is the celebration of John Burroughs’s
seventy-fifth birthday in the Bird Hall of the American Museum of
Natural History, when six hundred children of the New York East Side
schools, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, no trace of American stock
among them, came to tell Burroughs how they loved him and his writings.
Twelve bright girls and boys, each representing a volume of the edition
of his collected works and wearing the name of the volume suspended in
front, came forward and recited a verse or a bit of prose from the
volume represented. Tears came into the eyes of “the good gray poet,”
Burroughs’s own designation of Walt Whitman, as the love and admiration
of the spirited children poured in upon him. The scene reflected the
high purpose of literature, the interpretation of the spiritual and
moral influences of nature.

With a large following of grown men, a circle of admirers which included
such extremes as Henry Ford and Theodore Roosevelt, Burroughs was
preeminently the poet of the school children of America, his ability for
humanizing his dumb friends of the animal world having caught the fancy
of the children, thus giving him one of his claims to immortality in
America, if not in other countries. It was his part in America to throw
the light of nature into the “prison-house,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase,
which civilization throws around our youth:

             Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
             Shades of the prison-house begin to close
                   Upon the growing Boy,
             But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
                   He sees it in his joy;
             The Youth, who daily farther from the east
                   Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
                   And by the vision splendid
                   Is on his way attended;
             At length the Man perceives it die away,
             And fade into the light of common day.

His fellow poet of nature, John Muir, though in his way a writer of
large imagination, did not humanize his birds and mammals as Burroughs
did—a legitimate means of charming young and old with the habits and
moralities of animal life, provided one makes it clear that it is an
interpretation and an analogy and not a real resemblance being pictured.
Burroughs loved nature of the East—of New York and New England—as Muir,
his junior by only a year, cast over us the spell of the Pacific Coast,
from Alaska to southern California, in all its virgin grandeur. On the
voyages to Alaska in 1899 “the two Johns,” as they were affectionately
called by their companions, met day by day. Alike in their disregard of
conventions, in absent-mindedness in such trivial matters as clothing
and food, and in their readiness to absorb and to pour out their
nature-philosophy, it would appear that one steamer was not quite large
enough for two such great men, accustomed as each was, in his advancing
years, to unchecked discourse and to reverent attention and interest!

In my intimacy with Muir I learned that his views did not entirely
harmonize with those of Burroughs; the difference was more or less
traceable, I believe, to the Scotch ancestry of Muir and to his severe
and rugged bringing up as contrasted with the more equable environment
of Burroughs’s youth. Muir chose for observation those aspects of nature
which present the greatest obstacles, glaciers and mountain tops,
although he had tender moments with birds and found a personality in
trees. He wrote about trees as has no one else in the whole history of
trees, chiefly because he loved them as he loved men and women, and his
powers of expression were gathered from classic British sources, such as
the King James version of the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and Carlyle,
with little influence from Thoreau and none from Whitman.

In feature and in spirit of the Nordic stock, with a dash of Celtic
temperament, Burroughs was true to his heredity. From the paternal side
of his ancestry Burroughs received, according to a close student of his
forebears, his religious and moral nature, his stubbornness, his
persistence, his emotional tendencies, his love of beauty, his curiosity
as to causes and explanations; these were the Nordic traits of his
pedigree. Of English ancestry on his mother’s side, he inherited from
the Kelly line, perhaps Celtic, his slight melancholy and his care-free
love of nature. There are numerous divines on the paternal Burroughs
side, given to Bible reading; on the maternal Kelly side are country
folk, lovers of the outdoors, fishermen, foxhunters, one hermit, and one
Bible reader, “Granther Kelly.” Thus Burroughs’s intellectual and
spiritual pedigree recalls what Goethe says of his own parents:

                  To my father I owe my stature,
                  My impulse to the serious life;
                  To my mother dear my joyous nature,
                  My love of story-telling.

At various times in Burroughs’s life one set of impulses and then
another predominated, but his genius manifested itself in three ways:
first, in the possession of what may be called the _nature supersense_,
a rare endowment observed also in Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, and
recorded by them in some of their most beautiful sentences:

  This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
  imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange
  liberty in nature, a part of itself. (Thoreau: “Walden.”)

  ... We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night
  and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their
  bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them
  comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought,
  and suffer nature to entrance us.... These enchantments are medicinal,
  they sober and heal us. (Emerson: “Nature.”)

  Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently as the hush and
  stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest
  hour of the day. And as the hermit’s evening hymn goes up from the
  deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of
  sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint
  types and symbols. (Burroughs: “In the Hemlocks.”)

Of the reality of this nature supersense there is as little doubt as of
its rarity.

Burroughs may be called a natural philosopher—a nature-lover more than a
naturalist, for the latter term is reserved for the few gifted ones,
like Darwin and Fabre. His powers of original observation of nature were
not great powers such as would entitle him to be called a great
naturalist, but powers of intimate, truthful, and sympathetic
observation joined with a love of expression that made him a prolific
producer, and that suggested the title of his first paper, “Expression,”
published in 1860. The naturalist instinct has certainly been rare among
other poets and men of letters. Emerson’s “Nature,” published in 1835,
might have been written at his library table, gazing into the firelight,
although his poems, “May-Day,” “To the Humble Bee,” “The Rhodora,” and
“Titmouse,” are full of the nature vision. Maeterlinck’s delightful
naturalistic writings are rather the mastery of the observations of
Fabre than of a single original observation on his own part. Similarly,
the natural philosophy so beautifully expressed by Tennyson in 1850 in
his “In Memoriam” was drawn from conversations in a Darwinian club.
Wordsworth was richly endowed with the nature supersense, perhaps more
so than Burroughs, but he was neither observer, naturalist, nor natural
philosopher; he was preeminently the spiritual interpreter. On the other
hand, the naturalistic poetry of Erasmus Darwin at the end of the
eighteenth century, his “Botanic Garden,” his “Loves of the Plants,”
were the rhythmic expression of original and philosophical thought of a
high order. This is true also of Goethe’s natural history writings and
poetic allusions to nature which sprang from original work in botany and
anatomy and brought him near a conception of the theory of evolution a
half-century before Charles Darwin.

We look to Gilbert White as one of Burroughs’s prototypes in the union
of observation and expression, to Izaak Walton in the joy of outdoor
life, and especially to the truly great Americans, Thoreau and Walt
Whitman. That Burroughs fell under Whitman’s influence very early, his
poem “Waiting,” written at the age of twenty-five, would seem to
indicate.

My own attention, at the age of twenty-two, was called to Whitman in a
memorable manner, when he was not considered fit reading for the young.
It was in 1879, in the rooms of Francis Balfour, younger brother of
Arthur, at Cambridge University, where there were weekly dinners at
which one met wits and celebrities from London and Oxford, as well as
from Cambridge. One evening I was approached by a tall youth with a
handsome face, long hair, flowing collar, and sensuous mouth, who began
immediately to offer an opinion of American literature. He said: “You
have no real poets in America. To me Longfellow, Whittier, and the
others are mere echoes of English singers. You Americans have only one
sweet and true songster, whom you do not appreciate, and that is Walt
Whitman.” These words and young Oscar Wilde’s appearance are indelibly
impressed upon my memory because they first brought home to me the idea
that the all-essential quality in a writer of eminence is that he must
be of his country, of his soil. This quality, preeminent in Whitman, was
possessed in no less degree by Burroughs, although Burroughs was by no
means so poetic. Americanism in Americans is essential for the
fundamental biological reason that our spiritual and intellectual
powers, to reach their highest development, must react to our own
environment and not to some other distant or bygone environment. Welcome
as British, French, or classical reactions may be among us, they are not
of our soil.

These are interpretations of Burroughs’s genius, not explanations; we
may examine and compare him with other men, but we cannot explain him
any more than we can explain the prehistoric artists of the cave period.
In each case the genius arrives, assumes leadership, and lifts an entire
community of less gifted souls to a little higher level.

This brings us to the sources of the racial soul. Why did the soul of
John Burroughs react throughout his life to the genial conditions of our
East, to its birds and plants and flowers, to its seasons, to its few
retreats still accessible where Nature has preserved some of her
unrestrained beauty in her contest with the ruthless destroyer that we
call Civilization? Why was he the poet of our robins, of our
apple-trees, of the beauties of our forests and farms? Why was he the
ardent and sometimes violent prophet of conservation?

Whence the poet’s soul, whence the soul of a race, of a people, of a
nation? Have we not reason to believe that there is _a racial soul_ as
well as a racial mind, a racial system of morals, a racial anatomy? This
is the thought to which I have been led in trying to penetrate to the
inner meaning of the life and works of John Burroughs, because, eager as
I am about anatomy, I am far more eager about the origin and development
of the moral, spiritual, and intellectual nature of man—the mystery of
mysteries in biology at the present time. When Huxley in his Romanes
Lecture held that Darwinism fails to throw light on the moral nature of
man, he was, in my opinion, wrong; yet the origin of the anatomy and
even of the moral nature of man is relatively simple when compared with
the origin of the spirit and mind of man. The peculiar mystery about the
origin of our spiritual and intellectual powers is that they appear to
arise before they are needed—they are ready to play their part before
the time and opportunity arise.

Moreover, we have long since abandoned Herbert Spencer’s teaching that
our spiritual and intellectual faculties are developed through the
inherited effects of use, and we now adhere to Weismann’s teaching that
the use or disuse of our spiritual and intellectual powers has no effect
whatever on our offspring, except in so far as it tends to keep us in a
normal state of mind and health. The death-blow to Herbert Spencer’s
view was given in the discoveries of prehistoric art within the last
quarter of a century, from which it appears that a race of men of
spiritual and intellectual powers arose in which the art spirit had
little to do with the struggle for existence and may have run counter to
it, as it does at the present time. These discoveries also appear to
give pause to the Darwinian theory of the origin of our spiritual and
intellectual powers through Natural Selection, for the periods in man’s
history and prehistory when the artist or the man of letters has been
best fitted to survive have been few and far between.

Again, this sudden emergence of our spiritual and intellectual nature
from the man of the environing woods, forests, streams, plains, and
deserts of primeval Asia and Europe does not favor Bergson’s view of the
creative evolution of an internal spiritual and intellectual impulse
which must flower out in time, because if Bergson were right we should
have spiritual and intellectual genius appearing out of season and
entirely out of accord with environment. This is not the case, because
there is always an adjustment, a relation, between the internal
spiritual and intellectual powers and the external nature of the time,
the beauty or the ugliness, the ease or the hardship. It is through this
reciprocal relation of the inner man and the environing world that there
are so few misfits. If Bergson were right, our western world would be
full of disharmonies; we should find Mediterranean geniuses springing up
in Scandinavian atmospheres, as is never the case. The _racial_ creative
spirit of man always reacts to its own historic racial environment, into
the remote past.

Our conclusion is that distinctive spiritual and intellectual powers
originate along lines of slow racial evolution in climate and
surroundings of distinct kinds. In the south were the Mediterranean
lines of migration along sunny seas, formidable enough in the winter
season, favorable to rapid development of maritime powers, together with
artistic powers, the Mycenæans, the Phœnicians, the early Italian races.
The Mediterraneans take nature for granted. In the centre of Europe were
the lines of Alpine or Celtic invaders, kept entirely away from the sea,
races of agriculturalists and of miners, rich in mechanical talent,
neither adventurous nor sea-loving. To the north lived a race of
hunters, of seafaring adventurers, resolutely contending with the forces
of nature, fond of the open, curious and inquisitive about the causes of
things; deliberate in spiritual development, very gradually they reach
the greatest intellectual heights and depths.

The racial aptitudes in these three environments of the past twenty
thousand years are now revealed in anatomy and will be no less clearly
revealed in the predispositions of morals, of intellect, and of spirit.
Here nature, religion, and beauty, kept apart by the superficial vision
of man in science, theology, and æsthetics, are one in the eternal
vision and purpose of the Creator. In the marvelous continuity of
heredity a thousand years are as yesterday.

This is my idea of the origin of the racial soul, this is my
interpretation of Wordsworth’s immortal lines:

             Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
             The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
                 Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                   And cometh from afar:
                 Not in entire forgetfulness,
                 And not in utter nakedness,
             But trailing clouds of glory do we come
                 From God, who is our home.

Burroughs, the poet of today, found himself at home in the environment
of his remote flint-making ancestors of northern Europe. The soul that
rose with him had its setting for countless generations in the north; it
came from afar, not in forgetfulness, reflecting and recalling the
northern clouds of nature’s glory.

[Illustration:

  JOHN MUIR
]


                               JOHN MUIR

I believe that John Muir’s name is destined to be immortal through his
writings on mountains, forests, rivers, meadows and the sentiment of the
animal and plant life they contain. I believe that no one else has ever
lived with just the same sentiment toward trees and flowers and the
works of nature in general as that which John Muir manifested in his
life, his conversations and his writings.

In the splendid journey which I had the privilege of taking with him to
Alaska in 1896 I first became aware of his passionate love of nature in
all its forms and his reverence for it as the direct handiwork of the
Creator. He retained from his early religious training under his father
this belief, which is so strongly expressed in the Old Testament, that
all the works of nature are directly the works of God. In this sense I
have never known any one whose nature-philosophy was more thoroughly
theistic; at the same time he was a thorough-going evolutionist and
always delighted in my own evolutionary studies, which I described to
him from time to time in the course of our journeyings and
conversations.

It was in Alaska that he quoted the lines from Goethe’s “Wilhelm
Meister” which inspired all his travels:

                 Keep not standing fixed and rooted,
                   Briskly venture, briskly roam;
                 Head and hand, where’er thou foot it,
                   And stout heart are still at home.
                 In each land the sun doth visit,
                   We are gay whate’er betide,
                 To give room for wandering is it
                   That the world was made so wide.

Another sentiment of his regarding trees and flowers always impressed
me: that was his attributing to them a personality, an individuality,
such as we associate with certain human beings and animals, but rarely
with plants. To him a tree was something not only to be loved but to be
respected and revered. I well remember his intense indignation over the
proposal by his friend Charles S. Sargent to substitute the name
_Magnolia fœtida_ for _Magnolia grandiflora_ on the ground of priority.
He quoted Sargent as saying, “After all, ‘what’s in a name?’” and
himself as replying, “There is everything in the name; why inflict upon
a beautiful and defenseless plant for all time the stigma of such a name
as _Magnolia fœtida_? You yourself would not like to have your own name
changed from Charles S. Sargent to ‘the malodorous Sargent.’”

John Muir’s incomparable literary style did not come to him easily, but
as the result of the most intense effort. I observed his methods of
writing in connection with two of his books upon which he was engaged
during the years 1911 and 1912. He came to our home on the Hudson in
June, 1911, after the Yale commencement, where he had received the
degree of LL.D. on June 21. He brought with him his new silken hood, in
which he said he had looked very grand in the commencement parade. On
Friday, June 21, he was established in Woodsome Lodge, a log cabin on a
secluded mountain height, to complete his volume on the Yosemite. Daily
he rose at 4.30 o’clock, and after a simple cup of coffee labored
incessantly on his two books, “The Yosemite” and “Boyhood and Youth.” It
was very interesting to watch how difficult it was for him. In my diary
of the time I find the following notes: “Knowing his beautiful and easy
style it is very interesting to learn how difficult it is for him; he
groans over his labors, he writes and rewrites and interpolates. He
loves the simplest English language and admires most of all Carlyle,
Emerson, and Thoreau. He is a very firm believer in Thoreau and starts
my reading deeply of this author. He also loves his Bible and is
constantly quoting it, as well as Milton and Burns. In his attitude
toward nature, as well as in his special gifts and abilities, Muir
shares many qualities with Thoreau. First among these is his mechanical
ability, his fondness for the handling of tools; second, his close
identification with nature; third, his interpretation of the religious
spirit of nature; fourth, his happiness in solitude with nature; fifth,
his lack of sympathy with crowds of people; sixth, his intense love of
animals.” Thoreau’s quiet residence at Walden is to be contrasted with
Muir’s world-wide journeyings from Scotland to Wisconsin; his penniless
journey down the Mississippi to Louisiana, Florida, across Panama, and
northward into California in its early grandeur; his establishment of
the sawmill, showing again his mechanical ability, as a means of
livelihood in the Yosemite; his climbs in the high Sierras and discovery
of still living glaciers; his eagerness to see the largest glaciers of
Alaska and his several journeys and sojourns there; his wandering all
over the great western and eastern forests of the United States; his
visits to special forests in Europe; his world tour, without
preconceived plan, including the wondrous forests of Africa, Australia,
New Zealand and Asia. Finally, his very last great journey.

When starting out on this South American journey, from which I among
other friends tried to dissuade him, he often quoted the phrase, “I
never turn back.” Although he greatly desired to have a comrade on this
journey and often urged me to accompany him, he finally was compelled to
start out alone, quoting Milton: “I have chosen the lonely way.” On July
26 I said good-by to this very dear friend, leaving him to work on his
books and prepare for the long journey to South America, especially to
see the forests of Araucaria. I know that at this time he had little
intention of going on to Africa. It was impulse that led him from the
east coast of South America to take a long northward journey in order to
catch a steamer for the Cape of Good Hope.

Among the personal characteristics which stand out like crystal in the
minds and hearts of his friends were his hatred of shams and his scorn
of the conventions of life, his boldness and fearlessness of attack,
well illustrated in his assault on the despoilers of the Hetch Hetchy
Valley of the Yosemite, whom he loved to characterize as “thieves and
robbers.” It was a great privilege to be associated with him in this
campaign. But certainly his chief characteristic was his intimacy with
nature and passionate love of its beauties; also, I believe, his
marvelous insight into the creative powers of nature, closely interwoven
with his deep religious sentiments and beliefs. Like John Burroughs in
many of his characteristics, in others he was totally different, and
these differences I attribute to the racial antecedents of the two men,
as studied in the “Racial Soul of John Burroughs.”

There were published in the New York _Evening Mail_ some verses by
Charles L. Edson with which I would close this all too brief tribute:

            John o’ the mountains, wonderful John,
            Is past the summit and traveling on:
            The turn of the trail on the mountain side,
            A smile and “Hail!” where the glaciers slide,
            A streak of red where the condors ride,
            And John is over the Great Divide.

            John o’ the mountains camps to-day
            On a level spot by the Milky Way;
            And God is telling him how He rolled
            The smoking earth from the iron mold,
            And hammered the mountains till they were cold,
            And planted the Redwood trees of old.

            And John o’ the mountains says: “I knew,
            And I wanted to grapple the hand o’ you;
            And now we’re sure to be friends and chums
            And camp together till chaos comes.”

[Illustration:

  HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER
]




                          HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER
                               1872–1922

  Like Theodore Roosevelt, Butler was a man of many talents and each
  talent was in the nature of a surprise to his friends. Under his
  extremely quiet and gentle personality lay force of idealism and of
  resolution, of courage and persistence which led him to great heights
  as investigator, teacher, and explorer. It is in respect to this last
  talent only that this “Impression” is written, because I spoke in the
  memorial service at Graduate College with others who dwelt on his
  other talents. As an archæological explorer Butler showed his
  resourcefulness and powers of command in the most remarkable way.
  Bedouins, Arabs, native Turks yielded to his quiet and persuasive
  power, though he rarely raised his voice above a low monotone. Again
  we turn to the language of Dante and of Homer to express appreciation
  of this great man.


                     HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER, EXPLORER

In the “Divine Comedy,” Dante speaks of Ulysses, of exploration of the
western seas and lands, of braving dangers, of overcoming obstacles, of
offering home, family, friends, life itself, in the quest of the great
unknown, its wonders, its beauties, its riches.

            “O brothers!” I began, “who to the west
            Through perils without number now have reach’d;
            To this the short remaining watch, that yet
            Our senses have to wake, refuse not proof
            Of the unpeopled world, following the track
            Of Phœbus. Call to mind from whence ye sprang:
            Ye were not form’d to live the lives of brutes,
            But virtue to pursue and knowledge high.”[12]

For two thousand years our ancestors, thus inspired, were facing the
setting sun, until the whole earth had been encircled by explorers.
Then, only a brief hundred years ago, the indomitable human spirit
turned eastward, toward the rising sun, the Orient, toward the buried
treasures and past beauties of the very peoples and civilizations which
had been pressing westward from the dawn of history.

Led by Layard, Schliemann, Evans, and a host of others, and chiefly
inspired by de Vogué, Howard Crosby Butler became a crusader in this
eastward tide of exploration. As a follower in his youthful Princeton
days, and in the broad and deep discipline of his graduate years, he
prepared himself. A short seven years after graduation, namely, in the
year 1899, we find him in the deserts of north central Syria in full
command—no longer a follower, but a leader, imaginative, determined,
successful, soon becoming distinguished. No one of us who knew the
gentle and almost too gentlemanly student of art and the classics under
Marquand and Frothingham would have divined his latent powers to command
Orientals, whether Arabs, Bedouins, or Turks. _Suaviter in modo,
fortiter in re_, he was first trusted, then almost idolized, by his
workmen.

It was the sterling integrity, as well as the consummate skill, of
Butler’s work in Syria (1899–1909) which led to the highest distinction
ever offered to an American and Christian explorer by a Mohammedan
government, namely, the unsolicited _invitation_ to enter and take
command of the excavation of Sardis. The Turks knew they could trust
Butler; they knew that he was absolutely honorable. The difficulties of
Sardis exploration had seemed insurmountable to others; the great period
of civilization and culture of Asia Minor, just older than the Syrian
and extending back to the Lydian and beyond, was buried fathoms deep.
These deeply buried ruins were to be entered under his brilliant
leadership between 1910 and 1922. His was the secret of
self-forgetfulness in a great cause. He never spoke to us of himself,
always of the workmen, of the colleagues, of the students, of the most
beloved Alma Mater. He was driven on, not by ambition, but by love—love
of his fellow men, love of his profession, love of beauty and truth.

Butler’s genial and idealistic view of life is reflected in the
characters and personalities which he brought to life, and now that he
has taken his place among the noble shades of the long period of 600 B.
C. to 600 A. D., the artisans, the architects, the poets, the merchants,
the rulers, the governors, even the shade of the supreme ruler, Crœsus,
will be grateful to him. We hear them murmuring: “We have been charged
with a mere love of gain and of the gold of Pactolus. You have shown the
world that we loved beauty, that we kept our covenants, that we honored
our deities.” Still more will the shades of ancient Syria and the shades
of honorable men and women of the early Christian Church, from its very
beginnings beneath the shadows of the ruined pillars of Sardis to the
glorious temples of Syria, honor and welcome him.

The span of Butler’s life as an explorer was only twenty-two years; his
name and his influence will endure as many centuries. So in _our_
bereavement we are consoled by _his_ immortality.

           ... That which we are, we are:
           One equal temper of heroic hearts,
           Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
           To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.[13]




                       BIOGRAPHIES BY THE AUTHOR
                               1883–1924

  FRANCIS MAITLAND BALFOUR, Embryologist. _Science_, vol. 2, no. 31,
    Sept. 7, 1883, pp. 299–301.

  ARNOLD GUYOT, Geologist. _The Princetonian_, vol. 8, 1883–84, p. 308.

  THOMAS H. HUXLEY, Biologist.

      Memorial address before the Biological Section of New York Academy
        of Sciences, Nov. 11, 1895. _Trans. N. Y. Acad. Sci._, vol. 15,
        1895–96, Sig. dated Jan. 14, 15, 1896, pp. 40–50. _Science_, N.
        S., vol. 3, no. 57, Jan. 31, 1896, pp. 147–154.

      “A Student’s Reminiscences of Huxley.” Biol. Lectures, Marine
        Biol. Lab. of Wood’s Hole. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1896, pp. 29–42.

  G. BROWN GOODE, Zoologist. “Goode as a Naturalist.” Address at the G.
    Brown Goode Memorial Meeting, U. S. National Museum, February 13.
    _Science_, N. S., vol. 5, no. 114, March 5, 1897, pp. 373–378.

  EDWARD DRINKER COPE, Palæontologist.

      Memorial Biography. _Science_, N. S., vol. 5, no. 123, May 7,
        1897, pp. 705–717.

      “A Great Naturalist.” _The Century Magazine_, vol. 55, no. 1, Nov.
        1897, pp. 10–15.

      “Life and Works of Cope.” Introduction to Syllabus of Lectures on
        the Vertebrata by E. D. Cope. Univ. of Penn., 1898, pp.
        iii-xxxv.

      “Work in the Mammals.” Address in memory of E. D. Cope, delivered
        at the meeting in the hall of the American Philosophical Society
        held in Philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge, Nov. 12,

    1897. _Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc. Memorial Volume I_, 1900, pp. 296–303.

  HENRY FILHOL, Palæontologist. _Science_, N. S., vol. 15, no. 388, June
    6, 1902, p. 912.

  KARL ALFRED VON ZITTEL, Palæontologist. _Science_, N. S., vol. 19, no.
    474, Jan. 29, 1904, pp. 186–188.

  JOHN BELL HATCHER, Palæontologist. “Explorations of John Bell Hatcher
    for the Palæontological Monographs of the U. S. Geological Survey,
    together with a statement of his contributions to American Geology
    and Palæontology.” Monographs of the U. S. Geol. Survey, vol. 49,
    “The Ceratopsia” by Hatcher, Marsh, Lull. Washington, 1907, pp.
    17–26.

  MORRIS KETCHAM JESUP, Administrator.

      _Science_, N. S., vol. 27, no. 684, Feb. 7, 1908, pp. 235–236.

      Address of Welcome at commemoration of the founding of the
        American Museum of Natural History. Unveiling of the statue of
        Morris K. Jesup. _Amer. Mus. Journ._, vol. 10, March, 1910, pp.
        60–67.

  CHARLES DARWIN, Biologist.

      “Remarks on Darwin.” _The Evening Post_, New York, Feb. 12, 1909,
        p. 3.

      “Darwin Celebrations in the United States.” _Nature_, vol. 80, No.
        2055, March 18, 1909, pp. 72–73.

      “Life and Works of Darwin.” Address delivered Feb. 12, 1909, at
        Columbia University on the hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s
        birth, Feb. 12, 1809, as the first of a series of nine lectures
        on “Charles Darwin and His Influence on Science.” _Pop. Sci.
        Monthly_, vol. 74, no. 4, April, 1909, pp. 313–343.

      “Acceptance of the Portrait of Darwin.” _Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci._,
        vol. 19, no. 1, pt. 1, July 31, 1909, pp. 21–22.

      “The Darwin Centenary.” Address in reply to the reception of
        delegates, Cambridge, England, June

    23, 1909. _Science_, N. S., vol. 30, no. 763, Aug. 13, 1909, pp.
        199–200.

  JOHN I. NORTHROP, Zoologist. Introduction to “A Naturalist in the
    Bahama Islands.” A memorial volume. 8vo. Columbia University Press,
    June 15, 1910, 276 pp.

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, Naturalist.

      “Scientific Worthies.” _Nature_, vol. 89, no. 2224, June 13, 1912,
        pp. 367–370.

      “Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823–1913.” _Pop. Sci. Monthly_, vol. 83,
        no. 6, pp. 523–537.

      “A Great Naturalist.” _Amer. Mus. Journ._, vol. 13, no. 8, pp.
        331–333.

  JOSEPH LEIDY, Anatomist. Biographical Memoir. Read by title at meeting
    of National Academy of Sciences, April 18–20, 1911. Presented to the
    Academy at the April Meeting, 1912. _Biographical Memoirs National
    Acad. of Sciences_, part of vol. 7, Feb., 1913, pp. 339–396.

  LOUIS PASTEUR, Bacteriologist. “The New Order of Sainthood.” _The
    Churchman_, vol. 107, no. 15 (whole no. 3560), April 12, 1913, pp.
    474–475. Reprinted by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 12mo, October, 1913,
    17 pp.

  EBERHARD FRASS, Palæontologist. _Science_, N. S., vol. 41, no. 1059,
    April 16, 1915, pp. 571–572.

  JOHN MUIR, Naturalist. _Sierra Club Bulletin_, vol. 10, no. 1,
    January, 1916, pp. 29–32.

  GUSTAV SCHWALBE, Anatomist. _Science_, N. S., vol. 44, no. 1125, July
    21, 1916, p. 97.

  JOEL ASAPH ALLEN, Zoologist.

      Foreword to “Autobiographical Notes and a Bibliography of the
        Scientific Publications of Joel Asaph Allen.” _Amer. Mus. Nat.
        Hist. Publ._, 8vo, Dec. 26, 1916, xi and 215 pp.

      “An Appreciation.” _Nat. Hist._, vol. 21, pp. 513–515.

  WILLIAM BERRYMAN SCOTT, Palæontologist. “The Work of Professor William
    Berryman Scott ’77.” _The Princeton Alumni Weekly_, vol. 17, no. 10,
    Dec. 5, 1917, pp. 225–226.

  JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE, Lawyer. A Tribute from the Trustees of the
    American Museum. _Mus. Publ._ 4to, June 25, 1918, 34 pp.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT, Explorer.

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        41, p. 7, Jan. 6, 1919.

      “Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist.” _Nat. Hist._, vol. 19, no. 1,
        March 28, 1919, pp. 9–10.

      “Roosevelt the Student of Nature.” _The New York Sun_, vol. 89,
        no. 55, Nov. 3, 1921, p. 24.

  SAMUEL WENDELL WILLISTON, Palæontologist.

      _Journ. of Geol._, vol. 26, no. 8, Nov.-Dec., 1918, pp. 673–689.
        _Science_, N. S., vol. 49, no. 1264, pp. 274–278, March 21,
        1919. _Bull. Geol. Soc. of Amer._, vol. 30, pp. 66–76.

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        Xi Quart._, vol. 7, no. 1, July 19, 1919, pp. 2–6.

  JAMES BRYCE, Author. Address on Viscount Bryce at the Memorial Service
    in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, March 5, 1922.

  JOHN BURROUGHS, Naturalist. “The Racial Soul of John Burroughs.”
    Address at the Memorial Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and
    Letters, November 18, 1921.

  HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER, Archæologist. Address at the Memorial Meeting in
    Graduate College, Princeton University, October 21, 1922.

-----

Footnote 1:

The author has written fifty-seven biographic sketches, forty of which
  are listed in the appendix of this volume.

Footnote 2:

See his principal work, entitled “Naturalist on the River Amazons,” 2
  vols., 8vo, John Murray, London. 1863.

Footnote 3:

Alfred Tennyson, Edgar Allen Poe, Felix Mendelssohn, Oliver Wendell
  Holmes, William Ewart Gladstone.

Footnote 4:

Vallery-Radot, René. “The Life of Pasteur.” Translation of Mrs. R. L.
  Devonshire. (London, Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., 1906, pp. 416,
  417.)

Footnote 5:

Osler, Sir Wm. “Man’s Redemption of Man.” 12mo. (Paul B. Hoeber, New
  York.)

Footnote 6:

Aristotle (“Physics,” ii, 2). “Art mimics nature.”

Footnote 7:

Gen. 2:15; 3:19.

Footnote 8:

“The Vision of Dante Alighieri.” Translated by the Reverend H. F. Cary.
  Canto XI, Hell, p. 47. “Dante’s Divine Comedy,” with an Introduction
  and Notes by Edmund G. Gardner, M.A. (London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
  New York, E. P. Dutton & Co.)

Footnote 9:

Longfellow’s Translation, Inf., Vol. XI, pp. 97–108.

Footnote 10:

This passage probably indicates that he was sensitive to being laughed
  at for his interest in these animals.

Footnote 11:

“The Smaller Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, New York”
  (jointly with H. D. Minot).

Footnote 12:

Dante Alighieri, “Inferno” XXVI, ll. 112–120. Translated by the Reverend
  H. F. Cary, A.M.

Footnote 13:

Alfred Tennyson. “Ulysses.” Last four lines.

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