WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 



Beaufort alive. The "Heredity" had meanwhile appeared and I 

 am afraid Brooks was disappointed with the reception it met, for 

 it was noticed with little more than formal sympathy. Looked 

 at in the light of subsequent knowledge its purpose was indeed 

 rather, as he says, "to turn the attention of others into this 

 channel" than to make an independent advance. In the preface 

 he wrote: "I have little hope that my views will be accepted 

 in the form in which they are here presented, but I do hope that 

 they may serve to bind together and to vitalize the mass of facts 

 which we already possess and that they may thus incite and direct 

 new experiments." That function he and his book did at length 

 admirably perform for many, both in England and in America. 



1885-89.* In going over my memories of Dr. Brooks I find tnat 

 rny mind does not separate him from his environment. I con- 

 tinually see him in the semicommunal life of the laboratory, 

 whether in Baltimore or Beaufort, Woods Hole or the islands of 

 the West Indian sea, which so stirred and charmed him. Even 

 his home life with its restful, satisfying beauty was but a detached 

 fragment of the other larger existence. I think of him as the cen- 

 tral figure, wise and kind, of a circle of young men coining from 

 many quarters, from New England, the Middle States, the West, 

 and the South, from Canada, England and Japan, a society from 

 which older members were always going out to honorable careers 

 and into which new were coming to learn the ways and traditions ' 

 of the school. Very different were we, but knit together from 

 the start by the strong bond of a common interest, and presently 

 by growing appreciation of him who made the school. It took 

 us but a short time to learn that here was no mere work-shop, well 

 organized and in which we might acquire the requisite degree of 

 skill in a profession, but that we were in the company of a master 

 mind, wide ranging in the fields of knowledge and inquiry, pro- 

 found in contemplative thought, and with the acuteness of the 

 observer who discovers what has been hidden. 



As I dwell on the man and try to single out mental habits and 



4 Professor H. V. Wilson, University of North Carolina. 



