2 GEORGE LINCOLN GOODALE— ROBINSON [MBUOn V£S 



Doctor Goodale's medical practice, though extending through only three years, brought 

 considerable diversity of experience, for, in addition to private practice, he held several official 

 positions, being city physician in Portland, examining surgeon in the Navy, and contract surgeon 

 in the Army. He also taught in the Portland Medical School. 



In 1866, being in ill health, he made the first of his longer journeys, going to California 

 by the Panama route, thus gaining his first view of tropical vegetation. His health was soon 

 restored and he extended his journey to several of the Western States. 



On his return to Maine he married Miss Henrietta Juell Hobson, to whom he had for some 

 years been engaged and who through a long life was Ms devoted and sympathetic companion. 



Doctor Goodale was in 1868 appointed to the Josiah Little professorship of natural science at 

 Bowdoin College and there taught both in the medical school and in the collegiate work, giving 

 in the latter instruction in chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and zoology, for about four years. 

 In 1872 he was called to Harvard as university lecturer and instructor in botany. In the fol- 

 lowing year he was advanced to assistant professorship, and in 1S78 to full professorship in 

 this subject. 



It was his privilege, as well as one of his considerable contributions to science, to relieve 

 Dr. Asa Gray of much routine work in instruction, thus freeing Doctor Gray's time for his 

 long-projected Synoptical Flora of North America, toward which he had been gathering during 

 many years an overwhelming mass of material that only his trained judgment could have 

 treated to equal advantage. 



Doctor Goodale's first work at Harvard was his general introductory course in phanerogamic 

 botany, developed chiefly along the lines of gross morphology with ideals similar to those of 

 Eichler, of Sachs's Textbook, and of Gray's lucid Structural Botany. To morphology of such 

 nature he added much of a physiological and an anatomical character dealing effectively with 

 the different vegetable tissues and their component elements, with assimilation, respiration, 

 transpiration, germination, growth, and plant movements, as well as with reproduction, varia- 

 tion, and evolutionary problems. 



He was a finished lecturer. Dignified in presence and agreeable in voice, he had an impres- 

 sive manner which gave weight to the information he imparted. He was never hurried, but 

 chose his words with great care and passed logically from point to point. He was a good ex 

 tempore draftsman, often sketching on the blackboard in a few well-placed strokes the plant 

 structures or anatomical details he was describing. Each drawing was done with a fine definite- 

 ness and the minimum of erasure and correction. He never hesitated to employ the now 

 perhaps too generally discarded method of precise definition of terms or structures. Had 

 this been done with less skill it might easily have tended to the dogmatic, but this effect he 

 cleverly avoided. His auditors were carried away by the clearness of his presentation. He 

 was never tedious, never discursive, though, in a dignified way, often humorous. He had his 

 matter well in hand and there was no repetition, no talking against time, no pause to assist 

 memory. Not given to much theorizing nor to pliilosophic generalization, he stayed close to 

 concrete facts and in stating them never confused his hearers by over-emphasis of doubts or 

 exceptions. Hundreds of students recall his lectures with gratitude and admiration. It is to 

 be remembered too that these students were the same who daily listened to such teachers as 

 Norton, Shaler, Francis Child, William James, Farlow, Palmer, and Royce, all of them men 

 of great originality and force, distinguished stylists in their respective fields. 



In the laboratory Doctor Goodale was less successful than on the platform. He was always 

 kindly and exceedingly courteous to his students, but a trifle impersonal, guiding their work 

 with rather general directions, which often left them in some vagueness as to his wishes. 

 Research in the concrete sense in which it had taken form in the laboratories in France and 

 Germany had scarcely been transplanted to American botanical laboratories beyond the field 

 of taxonomy, and student publication of merit was exceptional before the middle eighties. 

 The elective system had not long been in vogue and was still in its youth. Laboratory equip- 

 ment was as yet scanty and very imperfect. Its use was chiefly to demonstrate known facts 

 and processes, and almost never for student research. Graduate study was rare and little 

 organized. There was much to change and to develop. 



