396 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



ova, and therefore from analogy we must ascribe a similar 

 origin to these minute beings the early history of which we do 

 not know, it may be urged with equal force, on the other 

 hand, that all ova and spores, in so far as we know anything 

 about them, are destroyed by prolonged boiling ; therefore from 

 analogy we are equally bound to infer that Vibrios, Bacteri- 

 ans, etc., could not have been derived from ova, since these 

 would have all been destroyed by the conditions to which they 

 have been subjected. The argument from analogy is as strong 

 in the one case as in the other." 



Returning to the subject again a few years later, with a 

 critical series of twenty experiments, each of three, five, ten, 

 fifteen, or even twenty flasks, used by way of checks and com- 

 parisons, — a rigorous experimenter would have been satisfied 

 when he had proved that sealed solutions subjected to a heat 

 of at least 212° for from one to four hours, became the seat 

 of infusorial life, at least of such as Vibrios, Bacterians, and 

 Monads, while all infusoria having the faculty of locomotion 

 were shown by a special series of experiments to lose this at 

 a temperature of 120° or at most 134° Fahr. But Professor 

 Wyman carried the boiling up to five hours, and in these 

 flasks no infusoria of any kind appeared. The question of 

 abiogenesis stands to-day very much where Professor Wyman 

 left it seven years ago. 



I must omit all notice of the ethnological work which has 

 occupied his later years, merely referring to the seven annual 

 " Reports of the Trustees of the Peabody Museum of Ameri- 

 can Archaeology and Ethnology," of which he was curator. 

 The last of these, issued just before the writer's death, con- 

 tain the principal results of his investigations of the human 

 remains he collected in the shell-heaps of east Florida, and 

 convincing evidence of the cannibalism of those who made 

 them. A fuller memoir, embodying all his observations of 

 the last six winters upon the Florida shell-mounds, was sent 

 to the printer just before he died. 



The thought that fills our minds upon a survey even so in- 

 complete as this is : How much he did, how well he did it all, 

 and how simply and quietly ! We know that our associate, 



