82 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



family tracing back the local connections of his English 

 ancestors. 



We cannot do better than conclude this notice with a 

 quotation from Dr. Garrison's valuable contribution to medical 

 history : 



" Some of the finest tributes to Billings after his death 

 came from England. One of the best is from Mr. J. Y. W. 

 MacAlister, Secretary and Librarian of the Royal Society of 

 Medicine : 



" In Billings has passed away the kind of man who makes 

 epochs. He was a great man in every sense of the word. Big 

 in body, big in mind, and almost superman in his power of 

 work, he impressed all with whom he came in contact with the 

 conviction that, whatever walk in life he chose, he would be 

 easily first. He undertook tasks and carried them through, which 

 ordinary men attempt only by means of committees, institu- 

 tions, societies, co-operations, and a vast amount of fuss and 

 noise. His plan was simplicity itself. If the thing was worth 

 doing, he simply did it. I saw him once ' resting ' in the 

 evening after a long and arduous official day. He was lying 

 on a couch, almost hidden by two mountains of medical 

 periodicals in every language, one on either side of him. He 

 was slowly, but without pause, steadily working through the 

 mountain on his right, marking the items to be indexed, and 

 transferring each journal, as finished, to the mountain on his 

 left. This was when he was, almost singlehanded, producing 

 month by month the Index Medicus and the still greater task 

 of the Surgeon-General 's Catalogue — two pieces of work with- 

 out which the rapid advance of medicine in the last thirty 

 years would have been impossible. 



" I remember his saying to me once when I said something 

 in praise of what he was doing, ' I'll let you into the secret — 

 there's nothing really difficult if you only begin — some people 

 contemplate a task until it looms so big, it seems impossible, 

 but I just begin and it gets done somehow. There would be 

 no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder 

 how the job was to be done.' 



" He had done a big life's work when he was called to plan 

 and administer the great New York Public Library, and he 

 tackled it on his own principle — without fuss or unnecessary 

 publicity ; he just ' began,' and each day's herculean ' chore ' 

 saw him miles on his way to triumphant success. 



" He was quite simply and sincerely modest, although this 

 did not prevent an amused but quite magnanimous contempt 

 for mere talkers. As an illustration of his modesty and sim- 



