430 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



highest standing in Latin, Rhetoric, English Composition, and 

 Botany. The Principal and the Vice-Principal of the school were 

 then Dr. Theodore Sterling and Sidney A. Norton, and in talking 

 over the influences that had molded his life, Professor Brooks, 

 when fifty years old, emphasized his debt of gratitude to the earnest 

 and broad-minded teachers in the Public Schools of Cleveland. 



But powerful as were the home influences and the school train- 

 ing there seems to have been an innate searching for truth that led 

 the quiet, reticent, "shy," gentle, thoughtful child to make original 

 observation and to look at many things from unusual points of 

 view. He was not satisfied with the obvious or conventional 

 explanation: his mind was unusual. Thus to a teacher who asked 

 him, "If the third of six, be three, what would the fourth of 

 twenty be?" he replied, "Five" for, said he, "I don't see that 

 altering the value of six alters the value of twenty." 



His interest in natural history was that of the normal child, an 

 interest in actions and in life and not in the collection of curious 

 objects. But while he was no born naturalist in the sense that 

 some are, who early learn to hoard up "specimens," he was fond 

 of observing birds, and a back-yard pond as well as home-made 

 aquaria served for delightful observations that left a lasting 

 impress. 



Passenger pigeons were then plentiful, myriads darkening the 

 sky, and stray ones came to the pond to drink. Then there were 

 the aquatic insects and snails with marvelous transformation and 

 developments. The fundamental nature of reflex and mechanical 

 acts in living things was indelibly learned by the sight of a dragon- 

 fly that, though reduced by accident to little but head, still con- 

 tinued to eat what was set before it, though the food passed at once 

 into empty air. 



His father was a practical man who believed in all kinds of 

 wholesome recreation for his boys, but was not himself given to 

 scientific interests. In the neighborhood, however, were boys 

 who collected insects, fossils, the then common Indian remains, 

 shells and other objects. In fact in the yard of the Tuttle boys, 

 their father had built them a frame structure they called the 



