674 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 
accomplished what I might have done. If I may extenuate my views I will 
say that for a country boy, with but little help and wholly without influence, 
the road to success is very hard..... Perhaps for me experience was the 
best teacher, and an easy path in youth might have caused failure. But it 
was hard, and I have more than once been discouraged. I have drifted along 
somehow, with one underlying ambition, to /earn. My plans and ambitions 
may seem fickle, first as an engineer, next as a physician, as a chemist, ento- 
mologist, paleontologist. I have tried various things, when one of them 
steadily pursued would have been better. In reality there was only one 
ambition—to do research work in science. And I have realized that ambition 
in a measure. I have published about 300 books and papers totaling about 
4,000 pages. But the chief satisfaction that I find now in looking back over 
my life is that I have been the means, to some extent at least, of assisting 
not a few young men to success in medicine and in science. 
Like all men of science who have risen to distinction, Williston 
was self-made, the impulses all coming from within; yet he was 
instinctively alert to seize every chance to learn and to expand 
his horizon. We cannot imagine a life-story more helpful than his 
to the youth predisposed to science who has both to discover his 
own talent and to explore every avenue of opportunity which pre- 
sents itself. 
Williston was born in Roxbury, now a part of Boston, July 10, 
1852. “The Williston family,” he writes, “has been traced back 
to about 1650 in Massachusetts; they were about the usual run 
-of common people, no one famous or even noted, whether for good 
ORE VAlie ne Some of them served in the War of the Revolution, 
and many were fishermen.” His father was born in Maine, and 
he remarks of this branch of the family that “they knew little of 
schools. My father, if he ever went to school, did not take kindly 
to study, for he never learned to read or write... . . It was a 
great pity, too, for my father was a man of far more than ordinary 
ability as a mechanic—he was noted always for his skill... . . Of 
all his children I resembled him the most, both physically and 
mentally.”” His mother was from England, having come with her 
parents to New Jersey about 1812. She had a fair common-school 
education, and the effects of her early English training and her 
accent remained through life. 
In the small garden attached to the little frame house in Roxbury 
began Williston’s first studies in natural history, at the age of four: 
