Decembeb 4, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



783 



the man whose kindness expressed itself 

 in deeds not made public. 



Professor Brooks was very fond of good 

 reading and familiar with the classics of 

 English literature and though he was not 

 able to acquire a library he did get and 

 keep at hand his favorite authors— not for 

 their bindings but for their thoughts and 

 modes of expression. His enviable use of 

 English came ia part from his reading but 

 was primarily a habit of mind. 



For one of his dogs that chewed up 

 Shakespeare and Tennyson, he had only 

 praise, as exhibiting the tastes of a gentle- 

 man, but the other that destroyed cheap 

 novels, was a worthless rascal. An even 

 more characteristic judgment was ex- 

 pressed when one of his students told him 

 that it required three generations to make a 

 gentlemen, and he replied that he thought 

 a gentleman was one who had considera- 

 tion for the feelings of others. 



In later years he developed a strong love 

 of music, and when it became impossible to 

 work through the evenings, as of old, he 

 passed many an hour in the enjoyment of 

 classical music that mechanical devices 

 have made reproducible by one who has 

 had no leisure for musical education. 

 Beethoven's fifth symphony, the overture 

 to Tannhauser and some fugues of Bach 

 were favorites of his. 



His love of flowers led him to make what 

 use he could of a city window and when 

 fate brought him a residence outside the 

 city, a great solace to htm was the dimtau- 

 ive greenhouse he was finally able to in- 

 dulge in. Denied the opportunities that 

 Darwin had, he could not carry on the 

 experiments upon the breeding and 

 heredity of plants that he wished, but 

 when, too late, he had some little space he 

 did such work as circumstances allowed. 

 But it was largely as a source of pleasure 

 and relaxation that he reared his favorite 

 flowers. His attitude of mind towards all 



forms of life was expressed in the follow- 

 ing sentence : 



As for myself, I try to treat all living things, 

 plants as well as animals, as if they may have 

 some small part of a sensitive life like my own, 

 although I know nothing about the presence or 

 absence of sense in most living things; and am 

 no more prepared to make a negative than a posi- 

 tive statement.' 



Brooks was not an experimenter, but an 

 observer of natural processes, from which 

 he endeavored to interpret logically. He 

 saw too many facts to be long satisfied with 

 the sharp cut result that seemed to follow 

 from experimentally severing some portion 

 of the phenomena from the rest. He was a 

 recorder of nature and a philosophic rea- 

 soner about the outside universe as it ap- 

 peared to his consciousness. 



While there was a grain of truth in the 

 remark of an artist who said that Brooks 

 owed his success to the hand drawings he 

 was able to make so well, his long labors 

 with the painfully slow methods of pen 

 stippling contributed to success, not so 

 much from artistic skill as from the leisure 

 to think which this cahn, sedentary occupa- 

 tion afforded. 



If directness be one hundred per cent, 

 of genius. Brooks also has this claim to be 

 regarded as a genius, for laboratory para- 

 phernalia were always means and not ends 

 to him and while he enjoyed the perfection 

 of a lens or a microtome, or a typewriting 

 machine, or the brilliance of a selective 

 staining fluid, technique was always re- 

 duced to its simplest terms in his work. 

 With customary pertinacity he continued 

 to use a simple friction tube when a larval 

 student would have none but a bright com- 

 plexity of screws, however iU made. How- 

 ever, when his work demanded it he would 

 use aU the refinements of Zeiss 's apo- 

 chromats and he wished that samples of all 

 makes of instruments might be in the 

 ' " Foundations of Zoology," 1899, p. 17. 



