6 GROVE KARL GILBERT— DAVIS lMEiI01R \?£.Txi, 



already had the clear-minded serenity that was so marked a quality of his whole expression in 

 later years. Of his efforts as a teacher, one of his boyhood playmates wrote: "Karl was of 

 too kindly a disposition to make a successful teacher of youngsters ; they would take advantage 

 of him." His own opinion, frankly told 50 years later, was that he could not control his 

 pupils, an unruly lot of country boys; so he gave up teaching when the school year was only 

 two-thirds over. This episode has a wholesome moral; it satisfactorily contradicts the current 

 myth that a delicate-minded young master of a village school must needs thrash all the dis- 

 orderly cubs in his classes as the only means of opening for himself an assured path to future 

 success. 



On returning to Rochester the unpugilistic schoolmaster found himself out of employment 

 for a time, and the experience of waiting for work was so distasteful to him that he recalled 

 its unpleasant impression many years afterwards in a letter to his elder son at a time, in 1912, 

 when the son had his turn of waiting at the end of one engagement for another. The father, 

 who in his later years adopted simplified spelling, wrote: 



I've had little experience with being out of a job, but enuf to know it is demoralizing. My slack time 

 was forty-nine years ago, and I recall that I had no hart to do the various things that I had supposed I very 

 much wanted to do when I was too busy to find time. Waiting for something to turn up seems to be an occu- 

 pation in itself, and anyone who can really utilize the time while he waits is to be congratulated. 



APPRENTICESHIP IN COSMOS HALL 



The period of unemployment did not last long. Gilbert soon found work in Cosmos 

 Hall, a scientific establishment which his former teacher, Professor Ward, had built on the 

 grounds of the University of Rochester for the assembly and preparation of zoological and 

 geological materials for sale to colleges and museums. Gilbert afterwards wrote of it: 



The establishment thus instituted grew and developed . . . Its work was performed largely by young 

 men of congenial tastes, who there acquired the practical experience which commended them later to the trustees 

 of larger responsibilities. It thus served incidentally as a training school in the natural sciences and especially 

 in certain branches connected with museums. 



This apprenticeship does not seem to have been entered upon so much because zoology 

 and geology attracted the youth of 20, as because an assistant was wanted and the youth had 

 nothing else to do; but the work must have proved satisfactory, for the youth kept at it five 

 years — from 1863 to 1868. His duties included the sorting and naming of countless specimens; 

 many thousand labels in the Ward collection, afterwards acquired by the University of Roch- 

 ester, are in Gilbert's handwriting of that period. During at least part of these years, evenings 

 were spent in home study of mathematics, with readings in anatomy and geology. In his 

 daytime work he must have learned many facts and have profited from the discipline of steady 

 occupation; but the philosophy of science could not have been learned any better by the hand- 

 ling of its material content during these five years of apprenticeship than during the preceding 

 four years of undergraduate study; yet a liking for scientific subjects seems to have grown up 

 during this laborious period and a loyalty to Cosmos Hall also, for he afterwards ranked him- 

 self "somewhat proudly" as its senior alumnus. Nevertheless, it is significant that Gilbert 

 mentioned the "practical experience" there acquired rather than the influence of the director 

 of Cosmos Hall as of chief value in preparing the young assistants for larger responsibilities. 



THE COHOES MASTODON 



Gilbert was occasionally charged by his chief with the installation of exhibits in museums, 

 and this gave him glimpses of the world. It may have been in the course of journeys thus 

 undertaken that he learned something by sight of the Pennsylvania Appalachians, to which 

 he refers in a most appreciative manner in his first western report. Perhaps the most impor- 

 tant assignment of this kind came when he went, in 1S67 and 1868, to the State museum at 

 Albany to restore and mount the skeleton of a mastodon, discovered a few miles away, at 

 Cohoes, on the Mohawk, in 1866. Probably as a result of this discovery, and as if with a 

 premonition of his work in mounting the skeleton, Gilbert wrote a general account of "The 



