A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE 
31 
perished when deprived of the constant current thus supplied, 
and that it was very difficult to procure them at all, adding 
that he knew of no young Stomatopod which had been reared 
from an egg outside the burrow or in an aquarium. 
The sentence just quoted was written in 1885, and we can ap- 
preciate the pleasure he must have experienced in being able to do 
the very thing to which he alludes, two years later at Nassau, for 
on the first or second day after reaching the Bahamas one of his 
students. Dr. E. A. Andrews, brought him "sl Gonodactylus 
and a bunch of yellow eggs,'' which had been broken out of a 
coral rock. Feeling sure that at last he was on the track of a 
stomatopod's eggs, he started at once for the beach, and it was 
not long, as he tells us, before ''the problem was solved, and I 
went home and to bed, confident that I should next day get all 
the embryological material I needed." The notable paper in 
which he has described how a stomatopod crustacean was for 
the first time reared from an egg, and followed in all its successive 
stages, alive, should not be overlooked, though appearing as a 
chapter in another work (The Embryology and Metamorphosis 
of the Macrura. Chapter III.). 
Researches upon the Coelenterata^^ Exclusive of preliminary 
accounts afterwards published in more amplified form, and of 
popular writings. Professor Brooks produced either alone, or in 
cooperation with his students, ten papers upon coelenterates. 
All are the results of labors of his maturity, for he was thirty-two 
years of age when the first was published. This may account in 
some measure for the high standard he maintained throughout 
these papers, for next to Agassiz we must rank him as the greatest 
student of the coelenterates of our country. 
The excellence of his work depends not upon the number of 
species he described as new to science, for of these he names but 
eleven during the whole twenty-seven years covered by his writ- 
ings on coelenterates. It is in the fields of embryology and anatomy 
that Brooks' work stands preeminent; and his life-histories of 
Dr. A. G. Mayer, Carnegie Institution. 
