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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1401 



else, and go on with the main, object of life 

 at that time with absolute unconcern. In 

 this, he manifested the calm that may rightly 

 be regarded as an inheritance from his Quaker 

 ancestry , and that undoubtedly carried him 

 through many difficult and awkward situa- 

 tions with an unruffled mind. His exactitude 

 of action was labelled by some as a tendency 

 to procrastinate for he would always turn up 

 just at the moment when a train was leaving 

 or was even already in motion. Such precise 

 punctuality resulted in unfortunate failure 

 sometimes when circumstances beyond his 

 control resulted in minor delays on the way. 

 His dogged determination is well illu- 

 strated by a comment made in personal cor- 

 respondence from Dr. C. B. Davenport, who 

 was an intimate friend of Field's and to 

 whom I am indebted for great assistance in 

 preparing this sketch. Dr. Davenport writes: 



An exceedingly valuable trait was his pertinacity. 

 I liave occasion to remember that, having put my 

 hand to the plow of civil engineering, I was loathe 

 to turn back; but Field had set his heart on my 

 coming to Harvard and he was irresistible. I owe 

 my entrance into biology as a profession to him. 

 This pertinacity showed itself in the way he upheld 

 the Concilium through many dark years and de- 

 clined alluring invitations to continue his work else- 

 where under more favorable auspices. None of 

 these suggestions or appeals seemed to make any 

 impression on him, if they involved a relinquish- 

 ment of his well-thought-out plans. 



Field's greatest work, and the one for which 

 he will always be remembered and through 

 which science has incurred to him an obliga- 

 tion that never can be discharged, was, of 

 course, the Concilium Bibliographicum. To 

 it he devoted his energies with intensity and 

 rare persistence in the face of apparently in- 

 surmountable difficulties. Indeed, it would 

 not be in the least an exaggeration to say 

 that the load, which he had been carrying, 

 especially in these months since the end of 

 the war when it seemed as if the project 

 might be put upon a permanent basis, even 

 though it met opposition in some quarters 

 and indifference in others, laid a tremendous 

 burden upon his shoulders. In fact, his in- 



timates had noticed for some months con- 

 spicuously that he was overworked even 

 though they had not suspected the collapse 

 which came so suddenly. 



While a graduate student at Harvard iinder 

 the leadership of Professor E. L. Mark, Field 

 became deeply impressed with the need for 

 the systematic rearrangement of the scientific 

 publications where, in the field of zoology, a 

 multitude of articles in hundreds of scattered 

 periodicals were unknovm even by title to the 

 workers in the field and could be brought to- 

 gether only at an entirely unreasonable out- 

 lay of time and energy. It was computed at 

 one time that there appeared annually up- 

 wards of ten thousand notes and articles, 

 distributed through at least fifteen hundred 

 periodicals in different languages. The un- 

 systematic condition of the literature and the 

 delays he saw in work repeated and in time 

 and energy wasted in hunting out the records 

 of the student's predecessors in order that 

 the investigator might start at least on a 

 level with those who had gone before, pro- 

 voked in his mind the insistent inquiry as to 

 the means for the improvement of the situa- 

 tion and the elimination -of this waste. I 

 think there is no doubt that he was stimu- 

 lated also by the general development of 

 systematic bibliography in the United States. 

 He planned to reorganize the field of zoology 

 and related sciences and to apply the decimal 

 pystem of classification, then recently de- 

 veloped and published by Dewey. Further- 

 more he felt that the arrangement of records 

 of the literature in book form fell short of 

 the best plan available, and he proposed to 

 substitute for it an analytical card catalogue 

 through which every new publication would 

 naturally and promptly drop into its proper 

 place, and the student thus be able in a 

 moment's time to gather together all of the 

 publications on a given topic instead of hunt- 

 ing for them through volume after volume of 

 an annual catalogue. Every zoologist is 

 familiar with the splendid way in which this 

 idea was developed and the unparalleled suc- 

 cess with which the literature of the subject 

 was indexed, for the Concilium cards have 



