chapter I 



I 



F THERE be such a thing as an average boy, I believe I was one. 

 My father, Ossian Gregory Howard, was born in Delhi, New 

 York, and my mother, Lucy Dunham Thurber, was born in the 

 same little town two years later. My father studied law with a 

 law firm at Ithaca, and after he was admitted to the bar he mar- 

 ried and started for the west with his young wife to begin life 

 in a new and growing country. They settled at Rockford, Illinois, 

 fifty miles or more west of Chicago, and I was born near the 

 close of their first year there. Then the law firm with which he 

 had studied offered him a partnership, and the young father, 

 mother and baby went back east to Ithaca, and there I grew up 

 and went to school. 



My friend, C. B. Davenport, the head of the Eugenics Labora- 

 tory at Cold Spring Harbor, is very keen on the subject of the 

 genealogy of men of science and has collected the data concern- 

 ing all of the members of the National Academy of Science, as 

 well as of many other scientific men, in the effort to find out 

 any evidences of heredity in scientific tastes. Such evidence in 

 my own case is very slight. My paternal ancestors were for the 

 most part physicians and preachers, with an occasional farmer, 

 and the same holds for my maternal ancestors. However, my 



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