Biographical Sketch 37 



Those who were with him during long periods of work 

 continued despite illness know his control, those few who 

 saw him seized with bitter pain know his fortitude. 



Beneath his passive exterior much went on that rarely 

 came to the surface and he had strong antipathies and 

 emotions held in check by a strong will and philosophical 

 balance. That he could take risks will be recalled by 

 those whom he, as licensed pilot, brought safely into har- 

 bor, though the keel of the schooner scraped the bar in 

 the trough of the heavy ground swell. 



His stern sense of duty drove him to many tasks he 

 neither liked nor felt he had the natural bent for. His 

 conscientiousness and punctilious regard for justice and 

 honesty brought him into antagonism with many customs 

 and with persons of less sharply defined honesty. 



In many excellencies he was a child to whom wisdom 

 of experience had come ; his spirit retained the simplicity 

 of the child and a child's interest in the outer world as 

 something apart from self, and did not readily acquire the 

 conventional content with mere getting and eating. 



Many have warm hearts for the clear teacher and wise 

 friend who lived much on a higher plane of work and 

 thought, above many petty considerations of immediate 

 expediency. His faults but add to the charm of that 

 large, luminous picture of virtues that the recollection of 

 him calls up in our minds. 



Who again will teach us, as Brooks did, that "that hard- 

 est of intellectual virtues is philosophic doubt, and the 

 mental vice to which we are most prone is our tendency 

 to assume that lack of evidence for an opinion is a reason 

 for believing something else."* 



May the Johns Hopkins University treasure as ever 

 living the example of Brooks, the naturalist one of the 

 two members of her illustrious faculty of whom their 

 great leader, Oilman, said they pre-eminently were "men 

 born for lives of research." 



""Science or Poetry," 1895. 



