Memoir of George Brown Goode. 57 



by naturalists that there was no science in America until after the beginninj^ 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 givinj^ careful attention to the study of precisely the 

 same phenomena of nature. The misfortune of the men of science of 17S5 was that 

 they had three generations fewer of scientific predecessors than have we. 



This address he followed up by a second, entitled The Beginnings of 

 American Science. The Third Century, delivered in 1887, also before the 

 Biological Society. He divided the period from 1782 to 1888 into three 

 periods, which he called after the names of Jefferson , vSillinian, and 

 Agassiz. 



Continuing along this same line, he contribttted to the American His- 

 torical Association, in ^890, a paper on The Origin of the National Scien- 

 tific and Educational Institutions of the United States. 



The material contained in these various papers was summed up in an 

 unpublished work entitled What has been done for Science in America, 

 1 492-1 892, which illustrates in an interesting wa}^ the development of 

 Doctor Goode' s mind, for in this study as much attention is given to 

 astronomy, physics, and even comparative philology as is paid to natural 

 history. Parallel with this work may be mentioned a collection of por- 

 traits of almost every scientific man of importance mentioned in any of 

 these fottr essays. Besides these, he wrote an article in the Science 

 News, 1878, entitled The earliest American Natiu'alist, Thomas 

 Harriott. 



He was greatl}' interested in American historj^ a close student of the 

 writings of the fathers — more especiall}^ of Washington and Jefferson — 

 and an enthusiastic investigator of Virginia history, for which he had 

 assembled a great mass of original material. He was especially interested 

 in the study of institutional histor}^ which he thought approximated 

 most nearly to the scientific method. It is more than likely that this 

 interest grew out of his studies in genealogy, the most splendid result of 

 which is his Virginia Cousins, though a great mass of material, still 

 unpublished, attests the fact that these genealogical collections were 

 intended to cover the South and to .serv^e as a contribution to Southern 

 history. He relates in the prologue to his Virginia Cousins that his 

 interest in the Goode family tree was awakened in him by his father at 

 the age of twelve. 



The significance of genealogical studies for American history he recog- 

 nizes in the following words: " The time is coming when the sociologist 

 and the historian will make an extensive use of the facts so laboriously 

 gathered and systematically classified by genealogists, and it is probable 

 that this can be better done in the United States than elsewhere;" and 

 again, "One of the elements of satisfaction in genealogical study legiti- 

 mately arises from the success of our attempts to establish personal rela- 

 tions with past ages and to be able to people our minds with the images 

 of our forefathers as they lived two, three, four hundred years ago." 



