442 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



traits of a white elephant, for its racing spars and deep center 

 board were difficult to manage. 



With both sloop and steam launch ten students returned again 

 to Beaufort in 1884, when the laboratory was opened June i to 

 September 19, though the illness of Doctor Brooks obliged him to 

 return after a month and to leave the laboratory in the care of 

 Dr. H. W. Conn. But the next year Doctor Brooks was again 

 there with eleven students for the fifteen weeks from May 23 to 

 September 15. 



These hot summer days at Beaufort were free from convention, 

 and some may recall their earnest leader in his room absorbed in 

 microscopic study, clad in a drying bathing suit that was not of 

 ideal fit. 



In all his work Doctor Brooks avoided indirectness and para- 

 phernalia, and did much with his own hands that might have been 

 relegated to a subordinate. He became a licensed pilot to run 

 the steam launch in and out of Beaufort Inlet and later took the 

 risks of acting as pilot to the schooner from Baltimore on the 

 voyage now to be described, though her keel scraped the bar in 

 the trough of the ground-swell. 



Rich as were the results of all these years of work at Beaufort, 

 the fauna there did not satisfy all the demands of one devoted to 

 the fundamental problems of the lower animals that make and 

 dwell amidst coral islands. To such tropical life Brooks now 

 made a daring journey. Starting May i, 1886, from the wharf 

 in Baltimore, in a small Bay schooner that was chartered by the 

 day, the party of seven after head winds and various mishaps and 

 a stop at Beaufort to take on laboratory furniture, did not reach 

 their destination, Green Turtle Cay, Abaco, Bahama Islands, till 

 June 2. Here they spent a memorable month of rare experience, 

 and some lingered on till later. Of this voyage Doctor Brooks 

 wrote to the Baltimore Sun: 



"We had been shut up for nineteen days in a little schooner, 

 smaller than those in which Columbus made his first voyage, in 

 a hold which did not allow us to stand erect, with no floor except a 

 few rough boards laid on the ballast of broken stone." 



