CHARLES T. JACKSON 109 



always wise and inspired by a wide-ranging knowledge of men 

 and things. He was the very type of that best of all groups of 

 men, the well-trained, devoted physician. 



A third brother of this interesting family, Rufus Wyman, 

 was personally little known to me, for he, too, shrank from 

 any kind of publicity, and thus was hard to know. Like the 

 others, he had the quality of devotion to his fellow-men with 

 so complete a willingness to put aside all considerations of self 

 that he never saw what his deeds meant in terms of sacrifice. 

 An instance of this came to my attention, when an invasion 

 of cholera slew a number of people in Boston and Cambridge, 

 among them Gould, the zoologist. Rufus Wyman saw several 

 people looking at a house on the other side of Main Street, in 

 Cambridgeport. Asking what was the matter, he learned that 

 there were cases of cholera there, and that no one dared to go 

 in. He went at once, stayed there and served as nurse until 

 death or recovery made his help no longer necessary. 



Next to Jeffries and Morrill Wyman, my relations were 

 closest with Charles T. Jackson, a man of a totally different 

 type; in fact, he and the noble brothers were at opposite ends 

 of the great procession of my time. Jackson was a man of un- 

 common ability and of wide learning in chemistry and geology; 

 most willing to help youths to their advancement but with an 

 eager, most human, often pitiful hunger for applause. He could 

 not rest on his solid accomplishments, on his for the time ex- 

 cellent geological work, and his full share in giving the greatest 

 boon ever given to suffering men and beasts, but he must have 

 a share of the approval of his fellows, for his mental digestion, 

 so to speak, with every meal. Boston, with its chariness of 

 praise and its unreasoning shallow contempt for demonstrative 

 persons, afforded him no outlet for his great talents, which 

 closely verged on genius. Had he lived in Paris, where a per- 

 sonality is appreciated for what it is worth, and not in the 

 atmosphere of decaying Puritanism, where he was stifled, he 

 would have won a great place for himself, and, what is better, 



