EDITOR'S PREFACE 5 



or on the streets. Agassiz, always picturesque and always in- 

 tensely alive, could not be said to have had a commonplace ca- 

 reer, for everything in life was to him a marvel. The wonderful 

 was ever close to his open-eyed enthusiasm, and the fresh-laid egg 

 of a snapping turtle recalled the whole succession in a world of 

 eternal life. Another picturesque figure was Audubon, artist and 

 gentleman, in his velvet hunting coat sketching the birds of the 

 American wilderness. 



But the rest lived quietly and worked quietly and saw truth. 

 Theirs were happy lives, for the most part very happy, and their 

 record is the register of "the permanent wealth" of our nation. 



Another feature we may note in these men is their willingness 

 for public service. The justification of science, is, after all, the 

 help it can give men towards better ordered lives. It was the dream 

 of Professor Baird that there should arise in Washington a great 

 body or bureau of cooperative science, that in this democracy 

 there should be maintained a body of wise men, keen-eyed men 

 who should accomplish by working together what none of them 

 could do separately, and the result of their combined efforts should 

 be always at the service of the bureaus of administration. Thus 

 from the Smithsonian Institution, Henry, Baird, Goode, Langley, 

 arose the National Museum, the Fish Commission; and in similar 

 fashion arose the Marine Hospital Service, the Bureau of Forestry, 

 and the other bureaus of investigation in the Department of Agri- 

 culture. But Baird was not alone in giving his great powers freely 

 to the public service. Many other have recognized the fact that 

 pure science and applied science are not different in nature or 

 function, and often science is strengthened and dignified when it 

 is tested by placing it in action. 



In going over the lives of these men, we notice that for the most 

 part each one followed his natural bent in devoting himself to 

 science. Love of his work, the pulsation of personal enthusiasm, 

 is perhaps the greatest single asset a man of science can have. 

 Nothing but love of the work could lead a man to take up a scien- 

 tific career in the pioneer days of the republic, and these days have 

 not yet passed. Men without enthusiasm can be trained to see, 



