WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 431 



"Museum" and the " Laboratory," and in it they did simple 

 chemical and electrical " stunts" and kept their collections. Some 

 of these older boys helped make the artificial pond in Brooks' 

 yard and went there to sail their hand-long "yachts." All who 

 had any bent toward natural history owed a lasting debt to the 

 old-fashioned, all-round naturalist and leading physician, Dr. 

 Kirtland, who had a real knowledge of the habits and lives of 

 birds, bees, fishes and of flowers and was never tired of stimulating 

 and aiding any youngster who showed a real interest in such things. 

 They all loved and reverenced him, though some might make 

 forays upon the fossil-collections in his barn. 



One whom he must have looked up to in natural history interest, 

 as friend of his elder brother, and also, by chance, his Sunday 

 School teacher at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, was Albert H. 

 Tuttle, now Professor of Biology in the University of Virginia. 

 From his attendance upon this church and his docile and con- 

 scientious learning of Sunday School verses he stored up an ac- 

 quaintance with the forms of theology that abided with him, 

 though he rebelled at the pressure of society that would too early 

 force upon his own children dogmas he wished them to judge 

 when matured. 



For good physical reasons the boy was not given to violent 

 athletic sports, though winning a prize for excellence in calis- 

 thenics, since he had a most perfect harmony of nerve and muscle 

 and a strong sense of form, rhythm, and spacial relations. 



He early read the works of Charles Darwin and gained an 

 abiding conviction of the impregnable nature of the evidence for 

 evolution and of the wide reach of the principle of natural selec- 

 tion. It should not be forgotten that this was in a period when to 

 many good people the names of Darwin and Huxley were as 

 Apollyon, and even amongst zoologists the new views were as yet 

 not universally accepted and their leader in America, Louis Agassiz, 

 in 1863, believed that naturalists were pursuing a phantom in 

 their search for material gradations amongst animals and trans- 

 mutations of lower into higher forms. 



In the fall of 1866 his father consented and the studious youth 



