Grove Karl Gilbert. 671 



Greek; both the ancient languages were continued into 

 his senior year. Rhetoric, logic and zoology each had 

 two units; and nine other subjects, including French, 

 German, and geology, but one each. The extended train- 

 ing in mathematics, for which young Gilbert had a 

 natural capacity, served him well in certain geophysical 

 researches of later years; perhaps his classical studies 

 contributed to the clear style of his reports, as they seem 

 also to have determined a tendency to the use of long 

 words of Greek origin and occasionally to the invention 

 of such words ; but they did not prevent his later adop- 

 tion of simplified spelling, which in his case as in so 

 many others was evidently a matter of temperament, not 

 of learning. 



Gilbert's instructor in zoology and geology was Henry 

 A. Ward, who came to be widely known for his extensive 

 dealings in natural history specimens ; the ' ' Scientific 

 Establishment' ' that he founded in Rochester was the 

 source of many school and college collections : but unless 

 by the rule of contraries it certainly cannot have been by 

 the influence of this enthusiastic collector that Gilbert 

 was led to say in the address, above quoted, that the 

 important thing is to train scientists rather than to teach 

 science, and that "the practical questions for the teacher 

 are, whether it is possible by training to improve the 

 guessing faculty, and if so, how is it to be done." It 

 must have been Gilbert's own idea, not his professor's, 

 that the content of a science is often presented so abun- 

 dantly as to obstruct the communication of its essence, 

 and that the teacher "will do better to contract the phe- 

 nomenal and to enlarge the logical side of his subject, so 

 as to dwell on the philosophy of the science rather than 

 on its material. ' ' 



The young graduate having no decided bent toward 

 any profession or occupation, but having reached the 

 pedagogically mature age of 19, taught school for a year 

 at Jackson, Michigan, not as the beginning of a career, 

 but, young- American like, as a means of paying off a debt 

 which his college course had occasioned. Then returning 

 to Rochester, he entered geology through being employed 

 for five years as an assistant in Ward's Scientific Estab- 

 lishment above mentioned. His work there included 

 the sorting and naming of countless specimens; many 

 thousand labels in the Ward collection, afterwards 

 acquired by the University of Rochester, are in Gilbert's 



