SKETCH OF WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS. 409 



that naturalists, like poets, are born and not made — or, if so, then 

 self-made — his teaching has been free from that too easily acquired 

 hallucination that the forcible introduction of facts, and frequent 

 extraction of words by means of examination, are a possible means 

 to the making of zoologists, or what you will to order, to be ticketed 

 and branded as such after a fixed term of the above process. Those 

 who are strong enough to grow in the open have found in him a 

 genial sunshine, but those needing hothouse forcing have sometimes 

 missed, perhaps, the care necessary to bring them to a marketable 

 state. 



Many who have followed his lectures will recall the clearness 

 and simplicity with which complex and puzzling questions were pre- 

 sented to their minds; the skull of the bony fish soon lost its terrors, 

 while the homologies of the limb bones were brought to the mind 

 in a graphic way, sure to leave a deep impression. Directness and 

 lucidity, with freedom from investment of unessentials, are char- 

 acteristics of his teaching and prominent features in his too little 

 known Handbook of Marine Zoology, which, despite technical faults, 

 was so original and honest, so free from closet natural history, that 

 it marked an era in the advance of biological instruction. It was 

 a direct appeal to the concrete study of living animals at a time 

 when zoology for students was still the learning of text-books, and 

 text-books were too often in spirit but modernizations of Pliny or 

 of Aldrovandus. 



It is this removal of the impeding paraphernalia of custom- 

 bound authority, and a direct, childlike communion with jSTature 

 in search of truth by one's unaided labor, that this man has to offer 

 to those who come under his sway as teacher; with what success 

 will be evident from the work of those who recently united to honor 

 his fiftieth birthday with a portrait that might recall him to them 

 as he taught them, and from the work of those who, in coming years, 

 will enjoy the privilege of contact with his genius and be led to 

 " seek admission to the temple of natural knowledge naked and not 

 ashamed, like little children." 



Forestry, Professor Fernow said in his paper at the American Associa- 

 tion, is not, as it seems to be popularly believed, "Woodman, spare that 

 tree," but "Woodman, cut those trees judiciously." The handling- of a 

 slowly maturing crop like forest trees requires especial consideration of a 

 problem quite unlike any other that presents itself to the business man. 

 The trees ripen slovvl}^, a full century often being necessary to the com- 

 plete development of growth. Obviously it would he inadvisable to cut 

 down the product and then wait a hundred years for further income from 

 the land; another system is necessary, where merely the interest is taken, 

 in trees which are in a condition to cut, while the principal, the forest 

 itself, remains always practically intact. 



