SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 727 



laboratory in order chat students might 

 learn to use and select what was fitted to 

 their work. From a spirit of patriotism 

 he sought to aid American instrument 

 makers at a period when their product was 

 but the poor things that now lie wrecked 

 from attempts to use them. 



He was sure to surprise with unexpected 

 thought. The canals of Mars, if really due 

 to the work of organisms, were, he sug- 

 gested, on the basis of what we know her, 

 more likely, formed by social arthropods 

 than by man-like beings, as they would 

 be work carried on by great coordinate 

 efforts through long periods. 



His interest in the topics of the day was 

 deep and real, but he was not a man to 

 serve in public life. He contributed to the 

 welfare of society by doing the best pos- 

 sible as a trained specialist. 



In the question of the admission of 

 women to universities made for men he 

 took his stand upon the basic biological 

 facts as he saw them, but, finally, with his 

 usual effort to be fair thought that the 

 experiment might be tried as one way of 

 finding the proper solution. 



Born a decade before the appearance of 

 the "Origin of Species," Brooks's intel- 

 lectual life unfolded during that remark- 

 able period of an overwhelming acceptance 

 of the doctrine of evolution by means of 

 natural selection. Most of his hard-earned 

 facts were brought to the support of evolu- 

 tion as revealed by embryology. Yet the 

 defects in Darwinism were long considered 

 by him and after ten years of thought 

 upon the problems of heredity Brooks, in 

 1883, put forth in his first book, 

 "Heredity," many ingenious thoughts 

 that led him, then, to an attempt to 

 reconcile the subsidiary hypothesis of 

 Darwin, the pangenesis hypothesis, with 

 the opposing facts of Galton. This at- 

 tempt to make pangenesis acceptable as the 

 basis of an understanding of heredity will 



always rank as an interesting contribution 

 to the history of thought upon this subject, 

 though, as Brooks expected, his special 

 views have not been accepted. This book 

 was put forth as a stimulus to research, 

 "to incite and direct new experiments," he 

 said. Its main interest lies in its revela- 

 tion of the best that could then be done 

 toward solution of problems that yet wait 

 such experimental evidence as alone may 

 make their solution possible. 



The lectures and essays that grew into 

 his book, "The Foundations of Zoology," 

 published in 1899, and again in a revised 

 edition, show Professor Brooks's breadth 

 and depth of philosophical thought, and it 

 is upon this work that his claim to a place 

 amongst our immortals wiU largely rest. 



But the estimate of Brooks as a leader of 

 philosophical zoology can best be left to 

 the perspective that time will bring and 

 to the minds of another generation biased 

 neither by lave of Professor Brooks as a 

 man nor, on the other hand, an absorption 

 in the activities of our present transition 

 period of zoological methods and ideals. 



What we can most surely appraise at the 

 present moment is the work of Brooks as 

 friend and teacher, an inspiration and 

 example. Men who have worked in close 

 contact with Brooks now hold commanding 

 positions in the intellectual life of the 

 world: the influence of their living pres- 

 ence is exerted in Japan, and in England, 

 in South Africa and in Canada, and 

 through his native country from Maine to 

 the gulf and from ocean to ocean. On 

 March 25, 1898, sixty of these students and 

 friends contributed with genuine feeling 

 to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was 

 truly an unique personality that had added 

 to their rational enjoyment of life and 

 helped in their own struggles for ideals. 



These students of a pioneer in the field 

 of American embryology have naturally 

 followed his lead and their observations 



