22 



Memorial Number. 



designed to offer a forum for scientific speakers in New York. 

 He opposed the idea at every point, saying that New York was 

 not a scientific center and that there would be no audiences. 

 Two or three days after that he telephoned me to call the meeting 

 which had been proposed but I expostulated that he believed the 

 affair doomed to failure. "Ah, but I have changed my mind," 

 he replied. So the meeting was held with Meltzer in the chair and 

 he overcame one after another all the arguments against the 

 proposed society which a few days before he himself had felt as in- 

 superable objections. Finally he said, "At any rate, we will 

 all go and form a small group to encourage the speakers." At the 

 first meeting Hans Meyer spoke and at the second this hall of 

 the Academy was crowded to hear Carl von Noorden on the oc- 

 casion of his first visit to America. And Meltzer's own lecture 

 before the Harvey Society on the "Factors of Safety in Animal 

 Structure and Animal Economy" attained world-wide celebrity. 



A few years before this New York as a scientific center was 

 pretty bleak and barren. In 1898-99 a few men, Lee, Herter, 

 Dunham, Park, John Thatcher, Benjamin Moore, then in New 

 Haven, and I, who were interested in laboratory work, met 

 together informally at each other's houses and learned to know 

 one another socially. This gathering was not resumed the fol- 

 lowing year. Then there sprang up a Society of Biological 

 Chemists which met at regular intervals in the physiological 

 laboratory of the New York University and Bellevue Hospital 

 Medical College for the reason that this was the only institution 

 to which access could then be obtained in the evening. This 

 society afterward merged with the Society for Experimental 

 Biology and Medicine and later gave its surplus of about a hundred 

 dollars to help institute the Harvey Society. 



It was in 1904, I think, after a meeting of the Society of Ex- 

 perimental Biology and Medicine that Meltzer drove me home 

 from the P. and S. He took me across the park in his brougham 

 drawn by a pair of horses. He said to me "I am going to give 

 up all this. I am going to do what is nearest my heart. I am 

 going to the newly founded Rockefeller Institute to spend the 

 rest of my life in research. They allow me to practice medicine 

 in so far as it pleases me, but my main desire is for experimental 

 work." 



