WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 437 



sexless with hermaphrodite states. For the eggs found in the 

 chains which produce sperm and are therefore males, are not 

 produced by these chains but are produced by the solitary 

 Salpas and put into the male chains to be carried and nursed 

 by them. 



The life-cycle he held was thus but an alternation of females and 

 budded out males. While "alternation of generation" did exist 

 in some animals, it did not in Salpa where the phenomenon was 

 first described, a paradox such as Brooks was ever fond of. 



By careful microscopic observation Brooks added new facts to 

 the known anatomy of Salpa, and by keen interpretation boldly 

 opposed the received opinions of the leading zoologists. Later 

 when the refinement of technique made it possible, he reexamined 

 and reiterated his views and was led on to many years of patient 

 toil upon various problems of anatomy and of embryology in 

 Salpa and its allies. Much of this work appeared in his great 

 monograph, the Genus Salpa, 1893, in which he devoted some 303 

 quarto pages and 46 plates to his facts and theories. 



In 1876 we find Brooks again at the laboratory of Alexander 

 Agassiz, and now ready to dedicate himself at the age of 28 to the 

 service of the fortunate school or institution that would prize him 

 as a man who, having profited by the best training in zoology his 

 country could give, had both successfully initiated a summer 

 school after the ideals of Agassiz, and had made discoveries which 

 he illuminated with the point of view of a genius. 



It was not the old college, rich in traditions but hampered by 

 customs and fears, but the new foundation laid by Daniel Coit 

 Oilman, with its motto " Veritas vos liberabit"; that drew to it the 

 rare spirits who were to embody its ideals. The opening of the 

 Johns Hopkins University with Professor Huxley's address, 

 February 22, 1876, was doubtless a welcome event to Doctor 

 Brooks, the philosophical zoologist. Twenty Fellowships, each 

 yielding $500, were to be awarded to men who could develop 

 research: of 152 applicants, 107 were deemed eligible and re- 

 ferred to specialists for election. Brooks was one of the twenty 

 chosen. 



