8 
WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS 
Beaufort alive. The ^'Heredity" had meanwhile appeared and I 
am afraid Brooks was disappointed with the reception it met, for 
it was noticed with little more than formal sympathy. Looked 
at in the light of subsequent knowledge its purpose was indeed 
rather, as he says, ''to turn the attention of others into this 
channel" than to make an independent advance. In the preface 
he wrote: ''I have little hope that my views will be accepted 
in the form in which they are here presented, but I do hope that 
they may serve to bind together and to vitalize the mass of facts 
which we already possess and that they may thus incite and direct 
new experiments." That function he and his book did at length 
admirably perform for many, both in England and in America. 
1885-89:^ In going over my memories of Dr. Brooks I find that 
my mind does not separate him from his environment. I con- 
tinuallj'- see him in the semicommunal life of the laboratory, 
whether in Baltimore or Beaufort, Woods Hole or the islands of 
the West Indian sea, which so stirred and charmed him. Even 
his home life with its restful, satisfying beauty was but a detached 
fragment of the other larger existence. I think of him as the cen- 
tral figure, wise and kind, of a circle of young men coming from 
many quarters, from New England, the Middle States, the West, 
and the South, from Canada, England and Japan, a society from 
which older members were always going out to honorable careers 
and into which new were coming to learn the ways and traditions 
of the school. Very different were we, but knit together from 
the start by the strong bond of a common interest, and presently 
by growing appreciation of him who made the school. It took 
us but a short time to learn that here w^as no mere work-shop, well 
organized and in which we might acquire the requisite degree of 
skill in a profession, but that we were in the company of a master 
mind, wide ranging in the fields of knowledge and inquiry, pro- 
found in contemplative thought, and with the acuteness of the 
observer who discovers what has been hidden. 
As I dwell on the man and try to single out mental habits and 
* Professor H. V. Wilson, University of North Carolina. 
