A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE 31 



perished when deprived of the constant current thus supplied, 

 and that it was very difficult to procure them at all, adding 

 that he knew of no young Stomatopod which had been reared 

 from an egg outside the burrow 1 or in an aquarium. 



The sentence just quoted was written in 1885, and we can ap- 

 preciate the pleasure he must have experienced in being able to do 

 the very thing to which he alludes, two years later at Nassau, for 

 on the first or second day after reaching the Bahamas one of his 

 students, Dr. E. A. Andrews, brought him "a Gonodactylus 

 and a bunch of yellow eggs," which had been broken out of a 

 coral rock. Feeling sure that at last he was on the track of a 

 stomatopod's eggs, he started at once for the beach, and it was 

 not long, as he tells us, before "the problem was solved, and I 

 went home and to bed, confident that I should next day get all 

 the embryological material I needed." The notable paper in 

 which he has described how a stomatopod crustacean was for 

 the first time reared from an egg, and followed in all its successive 

 stages, alive, should not be overlooked, though appearing as a 

 chapter in another work (The Embryology and Metamorphosis 

 of the Macrura. Chapter III.). 



Researches upon the Ccelenterata.^ Exclusive of preliminary 

 accounts afterwards published in more amplified form, and of 

 popular writings, Professor Brooks produced either alone, or in 

 cooperation with his students, ten papers upon ccelenterates. 

 All are the results of labors of his maturity, for he was thirty-two 

 years of age when the first was published. This may account in 

 some measure for the high standard he maintained throughout 

 these papers, for next to Agassiz we must rank him as the greatest 

 student of the ccelenterates of our country. 



The excellence of his work depends not upon the number of 

 species he described as new to science, for of these he names but 

 eleven during the whole twenty-seven years covered by his writ- 

 ings on ccelenterates. It is in the fields of embryology and anatomy 

 that Brooks' work stands preeminent; and his life-histories of 



14 Dr. A. G. Mayer, Carnegie Institution. 



