WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 21 



Gradually his breadth of knowledge and of interest made its deeper 

 impression. I came to see not only that his mind was encyclopedic 

 in the extent and accuracy of its information on countless subjects, 

 but that his vast mental activity was tempered and guided by the 

 informing conviction that what he knew was valuable only as he 

 could make it serve the human race. It was this quality fully as 

 much as his enormous scientific erudition which gave him the indis- 

 pensable place he occupied in the Conservation movement. 



Without Me Gee the Conservation movement would either have 

 been delayed for years, or would have been feeble and halting at 

 birth. His contribution to it has been far too little known. This 

 was due in part to the unavoidable circumstances of the case, and 

 in part to a generosity without parallel in my experience among sci- 

 entific men. McGee's generosity was of that rarest type which is 

 willing to supply ideas and the expression of ideas without asking to 

 be known in connection with them. Many and many a passage in 

 Roosevelt's Presidential messages and in other state papers dealing 

 with Conservation had its first beginning in McGee's penetrating 

 intelligence. Many and many a statement like the Declaration of 

 Principles of the great Conference of Governors, and the final Declara- 

 tion of the North American Conservation Conference, of which con- 

 ference he was not even a member, would have lacked much of their 

 quality and power except for his guiding hand. 



So far as such a thing can ever be said of any one man in a move- 

 ment so extensive, McGee was the scientific brains of the Conser- 

 vation movement all through its early critical stages. The 

 distinguishing fact about that movement from the first was its joint 

 consideration of all the natural resources together as the working 

 capital of humanity, and its object to make the best practicable use 

 of them for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest 

 time. The wide and balanced knowledge of this continent which was 

 so striking a peculiarity of McGee's intellectual equipment naturally 

 fitted him for this work in a very high degree, and gave him his 

 very special place in the history of Conservation. 



McGee at least as much as any other one man was responsible for 

 formulating the plan for the Roosevelt Inland Waterways Com- 

 mission, which for the first tune in any national project considered 



