WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 449 



In personal appearance Professor Brooks was not tall, short 

 in the limbs, of abundant flesh but of refined and small boning. 

 With long, straight hair, he was conspicuous at Harvard and in his 

 first years in Baltimore for his rich brown beard that added to his 

 appearance of reserve force and emphasized the keen beauty of 

 his seeing eyes. To the young student he seemed something 

 sphinx-like. 



The portrait by Thomas C. Corner, presented by some fifty of 

 his pupils on his fiftieth birthday, represents him as they knew him, 

 sedentary in habit, deliberate in all motions, rather careless of 

 appearance, and long rapt in meditations to be broken by an 

 individual uplift of the eye when about to express some matured 

 thought or long-delayed answer. 



His habits in work were evidently imposed by his physique and 

 by his circumstances of life. After a day of lectures and laboratory 

 work he might spend the evening with his family and later, when 

 the household was at rest, write and study far on into the night 

 with his feet wrapped warmly to gain the needed conditions for 

 intense brain activity. In vacation time he might work all day 

 or all night with his microscope, or rise early and work with inter- 

 vals of short sleep. In his last years he found night work no 

 longer possible and then turned to music to console and cheer his 

 lonely evenings, repeating on a mechanical piano his favorites, 

 such as the Fifth Symphony, the Overture to Tannhauser and 

 some fugues of Bach. 



In his lectures he did not use notes, and made blackboard 

 drawings with great care and symmetry. By imagining himself 

 in the place of the phenomenon he wished to describe, he often 

 made vivid and lasting impressions as in acting out the homologies 

 of front and hind limbs, or in conceiving himself incased in rubber 

 to make the locomotor organs of a squid, or clothed in the germ 

 layer of a chick embryo. Prof. W. H. Howel has said of Brooks' 

 lectures, "but the clearness, the orderliness, and the attractiveness 

 with which he could present a subject was really unrivaled, as far 

 as my experience goes. He seemed to have such a complete con- 

 trol of his mental processes, he thought so well and so clearly and 



