A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE 7 
through Brooks that I first came to reahze the problem which for 
years has been my chief interest and concern. At Cambridge 
in the eighties morphology held us like a spell. That part of 
biology was concrete. The discovery of definite, incontrovert- 
ible fact is the best kind of scientific work, and morphological 
research was still bringing up new facts in quantity. It scarcely 
occurred to us that the supply of that particular class of fact was 
exhaustible, still less that facts of other classes might have a wider 
significance. In 1883 Brooks was just finishing his book Her- 
edity '\ and naturally his talk used to turn largely on this subject. 
He used especially to recur to his ideas on the nature and causes 
of variation, and to the conception which he developed in '^Her- 
edity," that the functions of the male and female germ cells are 
distinct. The leading thought was that which he expresses in 
his book (p. 312) that "the obscurity and complexity of the phen- 
omena of heredity afford no ground for the belief that the subject 
is outside the legitimate province of scientific enquiry." He 
deplored the fact that he had no opportunity for the requisite 
experiments in breeding, but he saw plainly that such experiments 
were the first necessity for progress in biology. 
To me the whole province was new. Variation and heredity 
with us had stood as axioms. For Brooks they were problems. 
As he talked of them the insistence of these problems became 
imminent and oppressive. It all sounded rather inchoate and 
vaporous at first, intangible as compared with the facts of develop- 
ment which we knew well how to pursue, but with the lapse of 
time the impression became strong that Brooks was on the right 
line. That autumn I went home feeling that though in technique 
we were a long way ahead of Johns Hopkins — I had the pleasure 
of showing off the Jung microtome, then the latest thing in pro- 
gress, to the admiring Baltimore men — yet somehow Brooks had 
access to novelties of a more serious description. 
In the following summer I was again with Brooks at Beaufort, 
N. C, but in that year I soon fell ill and was for a long time too 
weak for much talk of any kind. Indeed, but for the devoted 
ministrations of Brooks and his students, who for weeks performed 
for me the offices of the trained nurse, I might never have left 
