December 30, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



933 



youth. There was Joe Le Conte, ever 

 clear-headed and ever lovable. There was 

 Newberry and Leslie and Gill and Allen 

 and Swallow and Leidj' and Calvin and 

 Marsh and Coues, "Wilder with his shark 

 brains, and Scudder with his butterflies, 

 and I know not what others, the great 

 names of thirty years ago, names which we 

 honor to-day. These men of the old school 

 were lovers of nature. They knew nature, 

 as a whole, rather than as a fragment or a 

 succession of fragments. They were not 

 made in Germany nor anj'where else, and 

 their work was done because they loved it, 

 because the impulse within would not let 

 them do otherwise than work, and their 

 training, partly their own, partly respon- 

 sible to their source of inspiration, was 

 made to fit their o'wn purposes. If these 

 men went to Germany, as many of them 

 did, it was for inspiration, not for direc- 

 tion ; not to sit through lectures, not to dig 

 in some far-off corner of knowledge, not to 

 stand through a doctor's examination in a 

 dress coat with a major and two minors, 

 not to be encouraged magna cum laude to 

 undertake a scientific career. The career 

 was fixed by heredity and earty environ- 

 ment. Nothing could head them off and 

 they took orders from no one as to what 

 they should do, or what they should reach 

 as conclusions. They did not work for a 

 career — many of them found none — but for 

 the love of work. They were filled with a 

 rampant exuberant individuality which 

 took them wherever they pleased to go. 

 They followed no set fashions in biology. 

 Such methods as they had were their <ywn, 

 wrought out by their own strength. They 

 were dependent on neither libraries nor 

 equipment, though they struggled for both. 

 Not facilities for work, but endeavor to 

 work, if need be without facilities, gave 

 them strength, and their strength was as 

 the strength of ten. 



For this reason, each typical man of this 

 sort had Darwin walking with him. He 

 became the center of a school of natural 

 history, a rallying point for younger men 

 who sought from him, not his methods, nor 

 his conclusions, but his zeal, his enthiisiasm, 

 his "fanaticism for veracity," his love for 

 nature, using that hackneyed phrase in the 

 sense in which men spoke it when the 

 phrase was new. 



Students of Agassiz, notably Scudder, 

 Lyman, Shaler and Wilder, have told us 

 what all this meant, where ' ' the best friend 

 that ever student had" was their living 

 and moving teacher. The friendship im- 

 plied in this, his worthiest epitaph, rested 

 not on material aid, but on recognition of 

 "the hunger and thirst that only the desti- 

 tute student knows," the craving to know 

 what really is, which outranks all other 

 human cravings. 



Marcou tells us the story of the wonder- 

 ful work done in the little college of Neuf- 

 chatel, without money, materials or pres- 

 tige, investigating, writing, printing, en- 

 graving, publishing, all in one busy hive at 

 a thousand dollars a year, when the great- 

 est of teachers had youth, enthusiasm, love 

 of nature and love of man as his chief or 

 only equipment. This story was repeated, 

 with variations, at Cambridge, and with 

 other variations by Agassiz 's disciples 

 throughout the length and breadth of 

 America. 



I heard Agassiz say once, "I lived for 

 four years in Munich under Dr. DoUinger's 

 roof and my scientific training goes back 

 to him and to him alone." Later in Amer- 

 ica, he dedicated his contribution to the 

 "memory of Ignatius Dollinger, who first 

 taught me to trace the development of ani- 

 mals. ' ' 



This suggests the thought of the heredity 

 in science so characteristic of the old school. 

 From Dollinger, Agassiz was descended. 



