404 Memorial of George Broivn Goode. 



The spirit of the early naturahsts may be tested by passages in their 

 writings which show how well aware they were of the imperfections of 

 their work. Listen to what John I^awson, the Carolina naturalist, wrote 

 in the year 1700: 



The reptiles or smaller insects are too numerous to relate here, this country 

 affording innumerable quantities thereof ; as the flying stags with horns, beetles, 

 butterflies, grasshoppers, locusts, and several hundreds of uncouth shapes, which in 

 the summer season are discovered here in Carolina, the description of which requires 

 a large volume, which is not my intent at present ; besides, what the mountainous 

 part of this land may hereafter open to our view, time and industry will discover, 

 for we that have vsettled but a small share of this large province can not imagine, 

 but there will be a great number of discoveries made by those that shall come here- 

 after into the back part of this land, and make inquiries therein, when, at least, we 

 consider that the westward of Carolina is quite different in soil, air, weather, 

 growth of vegetables, and several animals, too, which we at present are wholly 

 strangers to, and seek for. As to a right knowledge thereof, I say, when another 

 age is come, the ingenious then in being may stand upon the shoulders of those that 

 went before them, adding their own experiments to what was delivered down to 

 them by their predecessors, and then there will be something toward a complete 

 natural history, which, in these days, would be no easy undertaking to any author 

 that writes truly and compendiously as he ought to do. 



Herbert Spencer, in his essay on The Genesis of Science, lays stress 

 upon the fact that the most advanced sciences have attained to their 

 present power by a slow process of improvement, extending through 

 thousands of years, that science and the positive knowledge of the uncul- 

 tured can not be separated in nature, and that the one is but a perfected 

 and extended form of the other. " Is not science a growth? " says he. 

 "Has not science its embryology? And must not the neglect of its 

 embryology lead to a misunderstanding of the principles of its evolution 

 and its existing organization? " 



It seems to me unfortunate, therefore, that we should allow the value 

 of the labors of our predecessors to be depreciated, or to refer to the 

 naturalists of the last century as belonging to the unscientific or to the 

 archaic period. It has been frequently said by naturalists that there was 

 no science in America until after the beginning of the present century. 

 This is, in one sense, true ; in another very false. There were then, it is 

 certain, many men equal in capacity, in culture, in enthusiasm, to the 

 naturalists of to-day, who were giving careful attention to the study of 

 precisely the same phenomena of nature. The misfortune of men of 

 science in the year of 1785 was that they had three generations fewer 

 of scientific predecessors than have we. Can it be doubted that the 

 scientists of some period long distant will look back upon the work of our 

 own time as archaic and crude, and catalogue our books among the 

 " curiosities of scientific literature? " 



Is it not incumbent upon workers in science to keep green the memory 

 of those whose traditions they have inherited? That it is, I do most 

 Steadfastly believe, and with this purpose I have taken advantage of the 



