156 



nature:. 



[January 12, 191 1 



sided, every side altogether charming ; and Spencer F. 

 Baird, the father of cooperative science, the science at 

 the Capitol at Washington. There was Fred Putnam, 

 the ever-present veteran, a veteran even in his youth. 

 There was Joe Le Conte, ever clear-headed and ever 

 lovable. There was Newberry and Leslie and Gill and 

 Allen and Swallow and Leidy and Calvin and Marsh and 

 Coues, Wilder with his shark brains, and Scudder with 

 his butterflies, and I know not what others, the great 

 names of thirty years ago, names which we honour to- 

 day. 



These men of the Old School were lovers of nature. 

 They knew nature as a whole rather than as a fragment 

 or a succession of fragments. They were not made in 

 Germany or anywhere else, and their work was done 

 because they loved it, because the impulse within would 

 not let them do otherwise than work, and their training, 

 partly their own, partly responsible to their source of 

 inspiration, was made to fit their own purposes. If these 

 men went to Germany, as many of them did, it was for 

 inspiration, not for direction ; not to sit through lectures, 

 not to dig in some far-off corner of knowledge, not to 

 stand through a doctor's examination in a dress coat with 

 a major and two minors, not to be encouraged magna 

 cum laude to undertake a scientific career. The career 

 was fixed by heredity and early environment. Nothing 

 could, head them off, and they took orders from no one as 

 to what they should do or what they should reach as 

 conclusions. They did not work for a career — many of 

 them found none — but for the love of work. They were 

 filled with a rampant, exuberant individuality which took 

 them wherever they pleased to go. They followed no set 

 fashions in biology. Such methods as they had were 

 their own, wrought out by their own strength. They were 

 dependent neither on libraries nor equipment, though they 

 struggled for both. Not facilities for work, but endeavour 

 to work, if need be without facilities, gave them strength, 

 and their strength was as the strength of ten. 



For this reason each typical man of this sort had 

 Darwin walking with him. He became the centre of a 

 school of natural history, a rallying point for younger 

 men who sought from him, not his methods or his con- 

 clusions, but his zeal, his enthusiasm, his " fanaticism 

 for veracity," his love for nature, using that hackneyed 

 phrase in the sense in which men spoke it when the 

 phrase was new. 



Students of Agassiz, notably Scudder, Lyman, Shaler, 

 and Wilder have told us what all this meant, where " the 

 best friend that ever student had " was their living and 

 moving teacher. The friendship implied in this, his 

 worthiest epitaph, rested, not on material air, but on 

 recognition of " the hunger and thirst that only the desti- 

 tute student knows," the craving to know what really is, 

 which outranks all other human cravings. 



Marcou tells us the story of the wonderful work done 

 in the little college of Neuchatel, without money, materials 

 or prestige, investigating, writing, printing, engraving, 

 publishing, all in one busy hive at a thousand dollars a 

 year, when the greatest of teachers had youth, enthusiasm, 

 love of nature, and love of man as his chief or only 

 equipment. This story was repeated, with variations, at 

 Cambridge, and with other variations by Agassiz's dis- 

 ciples throughout the length and breadth of America. 



I heard Agassiz say once, " I lived for four years in 

 Munich under Dr. Dollinger's roof, and my scientific 

 training goes back to him and to him alone." Later, in 

 America, he dedicated his contribution to the " memory 

 of Ignatius Dollinger, who first taught me to trace the 

 development of animals." 



This suggests the thought of the heredity in science so 

 ancient or characteristic of the Old School. From Dollinger, 

 Agassiz was descended. From Agassiz, all of the naturalists 

 of the Old School of to-day, all the teachers and investi- 

 gators who have reached the sixty-year mark, or are soon 

 to reach it. These men, from Joseph Le Conte and 

 David A. Wells, of his first class, through Shaler, Wilder, 

 Putnam, Alexander Agassiz, Hartt, Baird, Walcott, Whit- 

 man, Brooks, Snow, Lyman, Clark, William James, 

 Faxon, Fewkes, Garman, down to Minot and myself, the 

 two youngest of the lot, as I remember — Minot venerable 

 already, according to the Boston Press. 



It is characteristic of the men of the Old School that 

 NO. 2150, VOL. 85] 



they formed schools, that they were centres of attractiui 

 to the like-minded wherever these might be. There wer^ 

 no fellowships in those days whereby men are hired v 

 work under men they do not care for and along lin< 

 which lead, not to the truth they love, but to a degree an 

 a career. We speak sometimes of the Agassiz school < 

 naturalists, the Gray school of botanists, as in Germain 

 " die ganze Gegenbaurische Schule " of anatomy, " d. 

 Ilaeckelsche Schule " of biology. These may be terms < 

 praise or of opprobium, according to the degree of om: 

 sympathy with that school and its purposes. 



To belong to a school in this sense is to share th 

 inspiration of its leader. The Gray school of botanis; 

 no longer place the buttercup or the virgin's bower at tl 

 head of the list of plants as a typical flower. Gray di' 

 this ; but this is not an essential in honouring Gray. The> 

 begin at the bottom, Darwin fashion, and the honour of 

 the end of the list is given to the specialised asters and 

 mints, or the still wider wandering orchids, the most 

 eccentric, the most remotely modified, no longer to the 

 tj'pical, the conventionally simple. In this there is a tacit 

 assumption that Gray would have done the same had he 

 possessed the knowledge which is now the common 

 property of his students. Probably he would ; but that 

 matters nothing, for each one follows his own individu- 

 ality. 



The characteristic of the Agassiz school was the early 

 and utter discarding of the elaborate zoological philosophy 

 which the master had built up. The school went over 

 bodily to the side of Darwin, not because Darwin had 

 convinced them by his arguments, but because their own 

 work, in whatever field, led them to the same conclusions. 

 No one who studied species in detail could look an animal 

 in the face and believe in the theory of special creation. 

 The same lesson came up from every hand, and we should 

 not have been true to the doctrines of the master if we 

 had refused faith to our own experience. When the 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology was finished, Haeckel 

 is reported to have said, perhaps in envy, perhaps in jest, 

 that " the output of any scientific establishment is in 

 inverse ratio to the completeness of its equipment." In 

 other words, the more men have to do with the less they 

 would do. 



Statistics show that in this paradox there is at least a 

 grain of truth, and this grain of truth stands at the base 

 of my own misgivings. With the scantiest of equipment 

 much of our greatest work has been done. It is said that 

 Joseph Leidy 's array of microscopes and knives cost not 

 less than a hundred dollars. The " Poissons Fossiles" 

 was written when its author lived from hand to mouth in 

 the Latin Quarter of Paris, copying " on the backs of 

 old letters and on odd scraps of paper the books he 

 needed, but which he could not buy." Since Haeckef 

 said the words I have quoted, if he ever said them, facili- 

 ties for biological work have multiplied a thousand-fold. 

 Every German university, Jena with the rest, and most 

 American universities as well, have a far greater equip- 

 ment than the Museum of Comparative Anatomy had 

 forty years ago. Victor Meyer is reported to have said 

 that the equipment of every chemical laboratory should 

 be burned once in ten years. This is necessary that the 

 chemical investigator should be a free man, not hampered 

 by his outgrown environment. In like vein, Eigenmann 

 has said that when an investigator dies all his material 

 should be burned with him. These should be his creation, 

 and he should create nothing which he cannot use. These 

 could be useful to none other except as material for the 

 history of science. Therefore, too much may be worse 

 than too little. The struggle for the necessary is often 

 the making of the investigator. If he gets what he war^ts 

 without a struggle, he may not know what to do with iK 



But facilities do not create. The men who have 

 honoured their universities owe very little to the facili- 

 ties their universities have offered them. Men are born, 

 not made. They are strengthened by endeavour, not by 

 facilities. Facilis descensus. It is easy to slide in the 

 direction of least resistance. That direction is not 

 upward. It is easy to be swamped by material for work, 

 or by the multiplicity of cares, or by the multiplication of 

 opportunities. I may be pardoned for another personal 

 allusion. I have spent the best portion of my life in_ the 

 service of science, but for the most part not in direct 



