Biographical Sketch 33 



"As for myself, I try to treat all living things, plants 

 as well as animals, as if they may have some small part 

 of a sensitive life like my own, although I know nothing 

 about the presence or absence of sense in most living 

 things ; and am no more prepared to make a negative than 

 a positive statement."'*' 



Brooks was not an experimenter, but an observer of 

 natural processes, from which he endeavored to interpret 

 logically. He saw too many facts to be long satisfied with 

 the sharp cut result that seemed to follow from experi- 

 mentally severing some portion of the phenomena from 

 the rest. He was a recorder of nature and a philosophic 

 reasoner about the outside universe as it appeared to his 

 consciousness. 



While there was a grain of truth in the remark of an 

 artist who said that Brooks owed his success to the hand 

 drawing he was able to make so well, his long labors with 

 the painfully slow methods of pen stippling contributed 

 to success, not so much from artistic skill as from the 

 leisure to think which this calm, sedentary occupation 

 afforded. 



If directness be one hundred per cent, of genius, Brooks 

 also has this claim to be regarded as a genius, for labora- 

 tory paraphernalia were always means and not ends to 

 him, and while he enjoyed the perfection of a lens or a 

 microtome, or a typewriting machine, or the brilliance of 

 a selective staining fluid, technique was always reduced 

 to its simplest terms in his work. With customary per- 

 tinacity he continued to use a simple friction tube, when 

 a larval student would have none but a bright complexity 

 of screws, however ill made. However, when his work 

 demanded it, he would use all the refinements of Zeiss's 

 apochromats, and he wished that samples of all makes of 

 instruments might be in the laboratory in order that 

 students might learn to use and select what was fitted to 

 their work. From a spirit of patriotism he sought to aid 



t " Foundations of Zoology," 1899, p. 17. 



