WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 433 



interest in prizes and marks; preferring to apply himself deeply 

 to topics that interested him even if night work should force him 

 to miss morning exercises. On graduating he was elected to Phi 

 Beta Kappa. 



Returning to Cleveland his future became a perplexing problem. 

 Postgraduate work was not then in vogue and every young man 

 who had obtained the A.B. degree was expected to enter a profes- 

 sion or begin self-support. But Brooks desired a higher education, 

 and satisfaction of his mental rather than of his physical self. 

 His step-mother did not favor further studies and at one time 

 Brooks entered his father's counting-house, but the tedium of 

 routine that had no immediate ideal in view for him was not to 

 his nature and he gave it up after inventing a simple calculating 

 contrivance that is said to have been used with satisfaction and 

 practical benefit. 



The only means to his goal seemed then, as so often now, the 

 life of a teacher, and for three years, 1870-73, he taught as one 

 of the Masters in the De Veaux College, a school for boys at 

 Niagara, New York. Here he practiced the art of simple exposi- 

 tion that made his subsequent university lectures so unusual. 

 Being free to enjoy the woods along the rapids and to contemplate 

 the majesty of the falls he was in an environment stimulating to 

 thought and aspirations. 



But from this stepping-stone the young man who would be a 

 zoologist must go to Louis Agassiz, to gain the best training the 

 country had to offer to the investigator of life. In 1873 Brooks 

 was one of those fortunate ones who shared contact with the re- 

 markable enthusiasm of Agassiz, the Master, in the well con- 

 ceived but inadequately matured experiment, the Summer School 

 on the Island of Penikese, in Buzzards Bay. The anatomy of 

 fishes and the vitality of the ancient creature, Limulus, were 

 impressed upon Brooks. Brooks was not daunted by the confu- 

 sion due to the incomplete state of the buildings, but got directly 

 at the essentials. With characteristic optimism he was found dis- 

 secting a shark in his wash-basin on his bed as a table. In the 

 second year of the School, in 1874, Brooks with other great pupils 



