418 WILLIS’ PUBLISHED PAPERS—GANONG. 
fitted him for wide knowledge and deep research. It is as a 
careful, persevering, and discriminating collector in a limited 
field that he rendered service to conchology. It cannot be said 
that he added anything of importance to science as a whole, facts 
of distribution within limited areas hardly deserving such a rank, 
but, content to work a limited field, he drew from it all it had to 
offer him and freely shared its fruits with all who cared to share 
them. Others saw better than he the significance of the facts he 
collected, and made the proper use of them. Such work as his is 
needed by science, and the man is a benefactor who does it well, 
no matter how limited his field may be, and the moral effect 
of work well done is as wholesome in science as it is in other 
affairs. 
Willis was a naturalist of an old, but happily not yet extinct 
type, one who loved nature for her own beautiful sake and not 
as those who make her works playthings for their delicate anato- 
mical tools‘and an excuse for their own self -glorification. Such 
men as Willis have a distinct value, and they are too rare in these 
days of much closet-work. They cannot do much as arule to add 
to science, but they do much to utilize its advances and translate 
its necessary technicalities into pleasant knowledge for them- 
selves and others. 
Such was John Willis, a man whose name will not be found 
among those which mark the line of scientific advance, but one 
who made the most of what circumstances allowed him, and who 
gave to the world the best that the limited field in which he 
worked was capable of yielding. 
