66 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BALTIMORE MEETING 



MEMORIAL OF SAMUEL WENDELL WILLISTON ^ 

 BY HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 



Samuel Wendell Williston, our distinguislied senior colleague in verte- 

 brate paleontology, passed away August 30, 1918, honored and beloved 

 by all who knew him. Our admiration for his character and achieve- 

 ments is enhanced through a perusal of his personal recollections^ of his 

 career, which reveal long struggles toward scientific attainment, lofty 

 ideals of exploration and research, and an unfaltering determination. In 

 the opening pages of his reminiscences he writes : 



"As the oldest living student of vertebrate fossils in America and one of the 

 oldest in the world, friends have urged me to write some of my recollections. 

 Not that I am so very old, but because there were so few vertebrate paleon- 

 tologists in the days when I first became interested in the subject— only Leidy, 

 Cope, Marsh, and a few other lesser lights in America. Nor were there more 

 than a dozen others in all the world, of whom Sir Richard Owen was the chief, 

 who had published much about extinct veT'tebrates. It has never seemed to 

 me that there was much of interest that T could say about myself, nor very 

 much about the pioneers in paleontology that I could tell. I begin to feel that 

 there are not many more years of work before me, and to regret that I have 

 not accomplished more, . . , But the way has often been hard, and I am 

 thankful to be spared so long and to have done what I have." 



And again, in closing : 



"My life, as I look back on it, has had many discouragements and many 

 pleasures. I have made many mistakes, as I now can see, and I have not 

 accomplished what I might have done. If I may extenuate my views, I will 

 say that for a country boy, with but little help and wholly without influence, 

 the road to success is very hard. . . . Perhaps for me experience was the 

 best teacher, and an easy path in youth might have caused failure. But it 

 was hard, and I have more than once been discouraged. I have drifted along 

 somehow, with one underlying ambition — to learn. My plans and ambitions 

 may seem fickle, first as an engineer, next as a physician, as a chemist, ento- 

 mologist, paleontologist. I have tried various things, when one of them, 

 steadily pursued, would have been better. In reality there was only one ambi- 

 tion — to do research worlc in science. And I have realized that ambition in a 

 measure. I have published about 300 books and papers, totaling about 4,000 

 pages. But the chief satisfaction that I find now in looking back over my life 

 is that I have been the means, to some extent at least, of assisting not a few 

 young men to success in medicine and in science." 



Like all men of science who have risen to distinction, Williston was 

 self-made, the impulses all coming from within ; yet he was instinctively 



1 Abstract of article, Journal of Geology, November-December, 1918, 

 = See Recollections, an unpublished autobiography, written May, 1916 ; copyrighted by 

 Mrs. S. W. Williston, 



