GEORGE LINCOLN GOODALE 

 1839-1923 



By B. L. Robinson 



In reviewing a scientific career, its time and place become factors of the first importance. 

 So rapid has been the advance of knowledge, so swiftly has effort passed to new fields, so intensive 

 has specialization become, that a retrospect even of half a century has grown surprisingly 

 difficult. To form a just estimate of personal achievement it thus becomes necessary to grasp 

 the difficulties of the epoch and to bear carefully in mind the limitations of the environment. 

 Only in this way is it possible to perceive the true nature of the obstacles surmounted, to measure 

 the advance attained, and to appreciate the individual contribution to progress. 



George Lincoln Goodale was born at Saco, Me., August 3, 1839, the son of Stephen Lincoln 

 and Prudence Aiken (Nourse) Goodale, and died in Cambridge, Mass., April 12, 1923. His 

 father was a man of energy and rare ability. A pharmacist by early training and profession, 

 he brought his knowledge of chemistry, excellent for the time, to bear upon many problems of 

 economic importance, and his activities in this direction ranged from the preservation of food 

 products to the manufacture of commercial fertilizers. He took a great interest hi fruit growing 

 and arboriculture in general. He became a person of importance in his State, and as secretary 

 of the Maine Board of Agriculture for many years edited their copious and well-known reports. 

 In his o r wn publications he dealt with the animal as well as the plant side of agriculture and 

 his Principles of Breeding was a highly regarded treatment of the subject. 



His son therefore grew up in an atmosphere charged with intellectual interests and had 

 constantly before bim the example of endeavor in the field of applied science. His early atten- 

 tion to chemistry, his choice of medicine as a profession, his attraction to the physiological 

 aspects of plant life, his breadth of scientific interest, and his enduring sympathy with the 

 applied aspects of science, all can be with fair certainty traced to paternal example and training. 



In boyhood he spent a year in his father's pharmacy. Then entering Amherst College in 

 1856 he took the usual prescribed course of the period, coming under the instruction of Prof. 

 Edward Tuckerman in botany and Prof. Edward Hitchcock in geology. He received his A. B. 

 in 1860. For a year thereafter he remained at Amherst as assistant in chemistry. There he 

 began his medical studies, which in the succeeding year were continued in the Portland 

 School for Medical Instruction and later at the Harvard Medical School, where he took his 

 M. D. with distinction in 1863, receiving the same degree the same year from Bowdoin College. 



Soon after his graduation at Amherst and during his medical studies he was selected to 

 cooperate in a scientific survey of Maine, an ambitious project which had received the indorse- 

 ment and support of the State legislature. In this work his duties included botany, chemistry, 

 and some geology, and in 1862 and 1863 he published several reports upon its progress. In 

 these he dealt with the flora of newly explored regions and the chemical analyses of waters from 

 various springs. He held at one 'time the position of State assay er and also prepared some 

 unpublished geological maps mentioned in the official reports of the survey. These diverse 

 activities were in several ways significant in his career. They brought bim into cooperative 

 relations with a notable group of young scientific men destined to make good and become 

 widely known in their respective fields, as, for instance, with C. H. Hitchcock, the geologist, 

 and A. S. Packard, the entomologist, and, what was still more important, his botanical work 

 brought him into correspondence with Dr. Asa Gray. The survey itself lasted but two years 

 and then succumbed to the disturbed conditions of the war time, but even in the few months 

 of its active prosecution attained creditable results and prepared the ground for more intensive 

 cultivation at a later period. 



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