A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE 7 



through Brooks that I first came to realize the problem which for 

 years has been my chief interest and concern. At Cambridge 

 in the eighties morphology held us like a spell. That part of 

 biology was concrete. The discovery of definite, incontrovert- 

 ible fact is the best kind of scientific work, and morphological 

 research was still bringing up new facts in quantity. It scarcely 

 occurred to us that the supply of that particular class of fact was 

 exhaustible, still less that facts of other classes might have a wider 

 significance. In 1883 Brooks was just finishing his book "Her- 

 edity", and naturally his talk used to turn largely on this subject. 

 He used especially to recur to his ideas on the nature and causes 

 of variation, and to the conception which he developed in "Her- 

 edity," that the functions of the male and female germ cells are 

 distinct. The leading thought was that which he expresses in 

 his book (p. 312) that " the obscurity and complexity of the phen- 

 omena of heredity afford no ground for the belief that the subject 

 is outside the legitimate province of scientific enquiry." He 

 deplored the fact that he had no opportunity for the requisite 

 experiments in breeding, but he saw plainly that such experiments 

 were the first necessity for progress in biology. 



To me the whole province was new. Variation and heredity 

 with us had stood as axioms. For Brooks they were problems. 

 As he talked of them the insistence of these problems became 

 imminent and oppressive. It all sounded rather inchoate and 

 vaporous at first, intangible as compared with the facts of develop- 

 ment which we knew well how to pursue, but with the lapse of 

 time the impression became strong that Brooks was on the right 

 line. That autumn I went home feeling that though in technique 

 we were a long way ahead of Johns Hopkins I had the pleasure 

 of showing off the Jung microtome, then the latest thing in pro- 

 gress, to the admiring Baltimore men yet somehow Brooks had 

 access to novelties of a more serious description. 



In the following summer I was again with Brooks at Beaufort, 

 N. C., but in that year I soon fell ill and was for a long time too 

 weak for much talk of any kind. Indeed, but for the devoted 

 ministrations of Brooks and his students, who for weeks performed 

 for me the offices of the trained nurse, I might never have left 



