Januabt 21, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



67 



social need of our day; but cooperation has its 

 unorganized as well as its organized forms, and 

 certainly the unorganized cooperation of men, based 

 on a sheer feeling of oommundty, is not less valu- 

 able than organized cooperation, which may or may 

 not have this feeling of community behind it. It 

 is easier to do most things with organization than 

 without; but organization ds to a great extent 

 only the scaffolding witbouit which we should find 

 the temple of human cooperation too difficult to 

 build. 



To say this is not to decry organization; it is 

 only to refrain from worshiping it. Organization 

 is a marvelous instrument through which we every 

 day accomplish all manner of achievements which 

 would be inconceivable without it; but it is none 

 the less better to do a thing without organization 

 if we can, or with the minimum of organization 

 that is necessary. For all organization, as we have 

 seen, necessarily carries with it an irreducible mini- 

 mum of distortion of human purpose; it always 

 comes down to some extent, to letting other people 

 do things for us instead of doing them ourselves, 

 to allowing, in some measures, the wills of ' ' repre- 

 senta/tives ' ' to be substituted for our own wills. 

 Thus while it makes possible in one way a, vast ex- 

 pansion of the field of self-expression that is open 

 to the individual, it also in another way distorts 

 that expression and makes it not completely the 

 individual's own. 



; In complex modern communities there are so 

 many things that must be organized that it be- 

 comes more than ever important to preserve from 

 organization that sphere in which it adds least to, 

 and is apt to detract most from, our field of self- 

 expression — the sphere of personal relationships 

 and personal conduct. 



, William Morton Wheeler 



NELSON R. WOOD 



For many years I knew the late Mr. ^Nelson 

 E. Wood, who suddenly died in Washington 

 on November eighth, and dxiring all those 

 years he was employed in the taxidermical de- 

 partment of the United States ^National 

 Museum. As a scientific and artistic taxi- 

 dermist he had not a single equal in this 

 country, and I personally never knew of his 

 peer anywhere in the world. Birds were ever 

 the special objects of his skill, and to the 

 mounting of them for museum exhibition the 



greater part of his life was almost daily de- 

 voted. While a consummate master with 

 birds of all groups, certain families of them 

 were his especial favorites, and these he pre- 

 served in a manner so perfect that they ap- 

 peared to need but the instillation of life to 

 have them go their way as they did in nature 

 when alive. The forms particularly referred 

 to were the game birds, pigeons, and fowls of 

 all descriptions, and many of these, together 

 with a host of others, are now on exhibition 

 in the cases at the United States National 

 Museum, where they will probably be viewed 

 for many generations to come. 



It has been my privilege to publish, in 

 various works both here and abroad, over a 

 hundred of Mr. Wood's mounted specimens of 

 birds and many species — not only those of 

 this country, but of all the Americas, 

 Australia, and other parts of the Old World 

 as well. They have ever been received and 

 spoken of with more than marked approval 

 and highly praised, as they well deserved 

 to be. 



It is not easy to estimate the far-reaching 

 loss the death of such a man is to a great 

 musemn, where high-class taxidermical work 

 is so essential and so constantly in demand. 

 In the entire history of the scientific art of 

 taxidermy in America, no one has ever left 

 such mounted specimens of game birds, 

 pigeons, and domesticated fowls as Mr. Wood, 

 while in the case of many of the passerine 

 types he was equally skilful. Only a short 

 time before his death he mounted several spe- 

 cimens of crows and jays — single pieces — and 

 the work is the wonder of all who see it. One 

 of our com m on Crow in particular is the most 

 life-like thing of the kind that one may well 

 imagine; it represents the height of the sci- 

 ence in regard to modern taxidermy, which 

 passed, only within comparatively recent time, 

 from the antiquated methods of "stuffing" 

 birds to the practise of imperishably preserv- 

 ing them in their natural poses. 



Mr. Wood gained his knowledge of the 

 normal attitudes of birds in nature through 

 his life-long study of them in their various 

 habitats. More than this — he had so skilfully 



