GOODE AS A HISTORIAN AND CITIZEN. 



B}' WiLiviAM IvYNR Wilson, 



Poslmasfcr-Gciicj-a/ of the IJiiitcd States. 



It has been most appropriately assig-ned to those who saw, and were 

 privileged to see, more of Doctor Goode than myself, in his domestic life 

 and in daily official intercourse, to speak of his virtues and his most 

 charming and lofty traits as a man; and to speak of him in his chosen 

 field of science must be assigned to those who do not, like myself, stand 

 outside of the pale of scientific attainment. The somewhat humbler part 

 is mine to speak of Doctor Goode in those relations in life in which he 

 was probably less known and less thought of than as a man of science or 

 in other fields of his distinguished attainment. 



The German professor, of whom it is related that on his deathbed he 

 mourned the waste of his life work in expending his energies on the 

 entire Greek language instead of concentrating them on the dative case, 

 gives a ludicrous and extreme illustration of that necessity for division 

 of labor and of specialization which all men recognize in this age of 

 ours. In the field of intellectual, as in that of mechanical, occupation, 

 the "jack-of -all -trades" is master of none; and while the rule for the 

 intellectual man and for the great student nmst always be to endeavor 

 to know everything of something and something of everything — at least 

 of everything connected with that something — it is becoming more and 

 more difficult in the compass of human life and human attainment to 

 live up to that rule. 



Doctor Goode was honored in his own country and in other coiuitries 

 as an eminent man of science, and deservedly so honored, and his lasting 

 fame must rest upon his solid and substantial contributions to science 

 and the advancement of human knowledge, on his eminent success as an 

 administrator of scientific organizations, and on that work which all his 

 life shows to have been most congenial to him — the bringing of science 

 down to the interest and instruction of the people. 



He was a richly endowed man, first with that capacity and that 

 resistless bent toward the work in which he attained his great distinction 

 that made it a perennial delight to him; but he was scarcely less richly 



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