BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

 PROFESSOR E. A. ANDREWS 



[Reprinted from "Science," December 4, 190S] 



At sunrise November the twelfth there passed peace- 

 fully away, at his home "Brightside," on the shores of 

 Lake Roland, one of the foremost of the few greatest of 

 American zoologists. 



William Keith Brooks was born March 25, 1848, in 

 Cleveland, Ohio, though his ancestors for seven or eight 

 generations lived in New England, coming to Massachu- 

 setts from England about 1634. He owed his early educa- 

 tion in part to the excellent public school teachers of 

 Cleveland, and in part to such elements of his boyhood's 

 environment as his native bent led him to pick out and 

 assimilate. Among such influences were collections of 

 fossils, stored in a neighbor's barn, and the wonder of the 

 flocks of carrier pigeons that still came over the lake to 

 be destroyed by clubs and guns on the bluffs, darkening 

 the air till school could no longer "keep." 



More significant yet were the home-made aquaria, and 

 the back-yard pond that was sometimes visited by a 

 migrating carrier pigeon and more often the source of 

 rare delight in the study of the habits of aquatic insects. 

 And it was there that was learned an indelible lesson of 

 the power of reflexes and mechanisms, by the observation 

 of a dragonfly that had lost most of its machinery except 

 that of the head, yet continued to chew and swallow food, 

 which, like the water drunk by Munchausen's bisected 

 horse, passed steadily out into the open void. 



He was not given to athletic sports, though winning a 

 prize for excellence in calisthenics. Contemplative and 

 studious, he was sent by his father to Hobart College. 

 After two years he entered Williams College where a love 

 of natural history was fostered by the society that sent 

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