396 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
ova, and therefore from analogy we must ascribe a similar 
origin to these minute beings the early history of which we do 
not know, it may be urged with equal force, on the other 
hand, that all ova and spores, in so far as we know anything 
about them, are destroyed by prolonged boiling ; therefore from 
analogy we are equally bound to infer that Vibrios, Bacteri- 
ans, ete., could not have been derived from ova, since these 
would have all been destroyed by the conditions to which they 
have been subjected. The argument from analogy is as strong 
in the one case as in the other.” 
Returning to the subject again a few years later, with a 
critical series of twenty experiments, each of three, five, ten, 
fifteen, or even twenty flasks, used by way of checks and com- 
parisons, — a rigorous experimenter would have been satisfied 
when he had proved that sealed solutions subjected to a heat 
of at least 212° for from one to four hours, became the seat 
of infusorial life, at least of such as Vibrios, Bacterians, and 
Monads, while all infusoria having the faculty of locomotion 
were shown by a special series of experiments to lose this at 
a temperature of 120° or at most 184° Fahr. But Professor 
Wyman carried the boiling up to five hours, and in these 
flasks no infusoria of any kind appeared. The question of 
abiogenesis stands to-day very much where Professor Wyman 
left it seven years ago. 
I must omit all notice of the ethnological work which has 
occupied his later years, merely referring to the seven annual 
“Reports of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum of Ameri- 
can Archeology and Ethnology,” of which he was curator. 
The last of these, issued just before the writer’s death, con- 
tain the principal results of his investigations of the human 
remains he collected in the shell-heaps of east Florida, and 
convincing evidence of the cannibalism of those who made 
them. A fuller memoir, embodying all his observations of 
the last six winters upon the Florida shell-mounds, was sent 
to the printer just before he died. 
The thought that fills our minds upon a survey even so in- 
complete as this is: How much he did, how well he did it all, 
and how simply and quietly! We know that our associate, 
