MetJtortal Meeting. 19 



through every grade of the Fish Commission and Museum serv-ice. It 

 is hard to reahze now the intensely rapid and eager development of our 

 national scientific institutions in those years. 



No doubt Baird's mantle fell fittingly upon Goode's shoulders, and he 

 had all but the magnificent physique of his master to qualify him for 

 this heavy burden. His talents and methods were of a different order. 

 Both men enjoyed universal admiration, respect, and even love, but 

 Baird drove men before him with quiet force while Goode drew men 

 after him. Lacking the self-confidence of Baird, Goode was rather per- 

 suasive than insistent. His success of administration also came partly 

 from an instinctive knowledge of human nature and his large faculty of 

 putting himself in other men's shoes. He .sought out the often latent 

 best qualities of the men around him and developed them. When things 

 were out of joint and did not move his way, he waited with infinite 

 patience for the slow operation of time and common sense to set them 

 right. He was singularly considerate of opinion. Not " I think," but 

 "Don't you think," was his way of entering a discussion. I am 

 reminded of the gentleness of my teacher, Francis Balfour, when one 

 of his students carelessly destroyed a rare and valuable preparation, as I 

 learn from one of Goode's associates that under similar provocation, 

 without a word of reproof, he stooped over to repair the damage himself. 

 He was fertile of original ideas and suggestions, full of invention and of 

 new expedients, studying the best models at home and abroad, but never 

 bound b}^ any traditions of system or of classification. He showed these 

 qualities in a marked degree in the remarkable fisheries exhibit which 

 he conceived and executed for Berlin in 1879, and continued to show 

 them in his rapid development of the scope as well as of the detail of a 

 great museum. To all his work also he brought a refined artistic taste, 

 shown in his methods of printing and labeling, as well as in his encour- 

 agement of the artistic, and, therefore, the truthful and realistic develop- 

 ment of taxidermy in the arrangement of natural groups of animals. To 

 crown all, like Baird, he entered into the largest conception of the wide- 

 reaching responsibilities of his office under the Government, fully realiz- 

 ing that he was not at the head of a university' or of a metropolitan 

 museum, but of the Museum of a great nation. Every reasonable request 

 from another institution met a prompt response. I well recall Goode's 

 last visit to the American Museum in New York, and his hearty approval 

 of the work there, especially his remark, " I am glad to see these things 

 being done so well in this country." Not the advancement of Washing- 

 ton science but of American science was his dominating idea. 



In fact, every act and every word of Goode's breathed the scientific 

 creed which he published in 1888: 



The greatest danger to science is, perhaps, the fact that all who have studied at all 

 within the last quarter of a centurj^ have studied its rudiments and feel competent 

 to employ its methods and its language and to form judgments on the merits of cur- 

 rent work. ... In the meantime the professional men of science, the scholars, 



