34 William Keith Brooks 



American instrument makers at a period when their 

 product was but the poor things that now lie wrecked 

 from attempts to use them. 



He was sure to surprise with unexpected thought. The 

 canals of Mars, if really due to the work of organisms, 

 were, he suggested, on the basis of what we know here, 

 more likely formed by social arthropods than by man-like 

 beings, as they would be work carried on by great co-ordi- 

 nate efforts through long periods. 



His interest in the topics of the day was deep and real, 

 but hie was not a man to serve in public life. He contri- 

 buted to the welfare of society by doing the best possible 

 as a trained specialist. 



In the question of the admission of women to universi- 

 ties made for men he took his stand upon the basic bio- 

 logical facts as he saw them, but, finally, with his usual 

 effort to be fair, thought that the experiment might be 

 tried as one way of finding the proper solution. 



Born a decade before the appearance of the "Origin of 

 Species," Brooks's intellectual life unfolded during that 

 remarkable period of an overwhelming acceptance of the 

 doctrine of evolution by means of natural selection. Most 

 of his hard-earned facts were brought to the support of 

 evolution as revealed by embryology. Yet the defects in 

 Darwinism were long considered by him, and, after ten 

 years of thought upon the problems of heredity, Brooks, in 

 1883, put forth in his first book, "Heredity," many ingeni- 

 ous thoughts that led him, then, to an attempt to reconcile 

 the subsidiary hypothesis of Darwin, the pangenesis hypo- 

 thesis, with! the opposing facts of Galton. This attempt 

 to make pangenesis acceptable as the basis of an under- 

 standing of heredity will always rank as an interesting 

 contribution to the history of thought upon this subject, 

 though, as Brooks expected, his special views have not 

 been accepted. This book was put forth as a stimulus to 

 research, "to incite and direct new experiments," he said. 

 Its main interest lies in its revelation of the best that 



