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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. LI 



In the year 1897 a disagreement occurred between Whit- 

 man and a minor, but influential, portion of the trustees. 

 The latter regarded him as extravagant, while he thought 

 they hampered the proper development and organization 

 of the laboratory. Some of the Boston supporters of the 

 laboratory thereupon withdrew from the board ; however, 

 the development of the laboratory suffered no serious 

 interruption. At the end of twenty-one years as director 

 Whitman was led to resign, owing to the growing demands 

 upon his time of his researches. 



It was in the early years of the Marine Biological Labo- 

 ratory that Whitman and some of his co-workers saw 

 the need of a technical zoological society and a call for 

 such a society was made by a committee of which he was 

 chairman. He served as president for the first four 

 years. At first known as the American Morphological 

 Society, it has been known since 1902 as ''The American 

 Society of Zoologists," and is still the national society for 

 this science. 



In 1889, Clark University having been organized exclu- 

 sively for graduate and research work. Whitman was 

 called from Milwaukee to become its professor of zoology. 

 He now took up again his work as a teacher which con- 

 tinued to his death. There gathered about him at Wor- 

 cester, Massachusetts, a small body of devoted zoological 

 investigators. What with the Journal of Morphology, 

 the Marine Laboratory and the organization of the new 

 department his time was pretty well filled. He published 

 three short papers on the leech, Clepsine. But affairs at 

 Clark were not altogether to his liking and when a call to 

 the University of Chicago came in 1892 Whitman and the 

 heads of the departments of physics, chemistry, anatomy, 

 neurology and paleontology seceded from Clark Univer- 

 sity and formed the major portion of the scientific faculty 

 of the new university. Here at Chicago Whitman had 

 more graduate students than ever before, but as his re- 

 search grew more engrossing he kept more and more to 

 his home where his experiments were conducted. For a 

 period of fifteen years he bred pigeons to get at an under- 



