200 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



strength made by the Archaeological Museum debarred him from 

 anything like his former care, yet he never forgot his first love; 

 and, during the last summer of his life, the writer found him, as 

 of old, coat off and brush in hand, dusting and rearranging the 

 precious things, the very children of his own industry; every one 

 of them reminding him of some special time in the bygone years. 1 

 With almost a sigh he looked about him, and said, "No one man 

 should try to establish a great museum alone; for it absorbs all his 

 time and attention, and sooner or later ruins him, or falls itself 

 into decay." 



Nor was this a temporary feeling, born of the day's weariness, 

 or the recent death of his colleague, Agassiz. Seven years earlier, 

 he had embodied the same conviction in the advice not to aim at 

 a multiplicity of specimens, but to select typical and representative 

 forms and parts. And, nearly as we may think that his own mu- 

 seum approaches his ideal, it can hardly be doubted, that, under 

 Providence, had it been one-half so large, Wyman's work would 

 have been lighter, his writings fuller, his life longer, and his fame 

 greater. But the past cannot be recalled. The man is gone. His 

 monument remains, its intrinsic value doubled by our recollections 

 of its builder. 



To the ardent naturalist the sharpest temptation is that forbid- 

 den by the tenth commandment. A rare specimen, a new fact, 

 a brilliant idea, these are the things which he covets, and can hardly 

 refrain from appropriating, upon an unconscious conviction that 

 he is best capable of using them for the world's benefit, and that 

 the end justifies the means. How far Wyman was thus tempted, 

 he alone could tell; but that he never yielded in word or deed 

 would be unhesitatingly declared by all who knew him. In this, 

 as in other respects, his was an almost "impossible morality." 



This freedom from the failings of ordinary men extended to 

 language and demeanor under all circumstances. The writer 



precedent, I understood) to take out of town his finest gorilla cranium and 

 humerus. 



i See Asa Gray's reference to the same period in the memoir named in the 

 note to p. 172. 



