1937 ] 
William Morton Wheeler 
65 
in particular, will regard these as his greatest achievements. 
There are, however, a favored few who have had the good 
fortune to derive from him, through personal contact, either 
as students or colleagues, a vast amount of information and 
inspiration which they will always treasure and some of 
which they will be able to pass on to their own students and 
younger associates. Wheeler always dealt with his students 
as he would with colleagues. With his broad intellectual 
viewpoint he could do this with ease, and without apparent 
effort he would quickly stimulate these young men to accom- 
plishments quite beyond their own expectations. He was 
always enthusiastically interested in his own work and how- 
ever deeply immersed in it, was always ready to welcome the 
student who wandered into his laboratory at any time. Fre- 
quently, such conferences would turn to an account of what 
he was doing at the moment or to a critical review of some 
important book which he had just read. The immediate 
effect of such contacts was frequently disheartening in the 
extreme, as it emphasized the extent of any biological prob- 
lem and the inadequate background of the young man who 
was attempting to solve it. However, the final result of a 
series of such meetings was highly salutary, and it gave to 
most of his students the impetus needed to complete their 
work well, and furthermore to prolong their studies after the 
inevitable doctor’s thesis had been finished. This ability to 
instill his own ideals of research into the minds of younger 
men was a salient characteristic of his personality and it has 
done much to further the real advance of entomological in- 
vestigation in many fields. 
To see him casually in his laboratory, working over a box 
of mounted specimens of ants and attaching to them labels 
with their Latin names, one would have taken him for a 
taxonomist pure and simple. Under such circumstances he 
was, and the endless amount of material from all parts of 
the world that passed through his hands during the thirty- 
five years that he was an authority on the classification of 
ants resulted in the description of an enormous number of 
new species, sub-species and varieties. Such work requires 
immense concentration, continuous study and perfect famil- 
iarity with a maze of literature. As a result most taxonomic 
workers lose interest in all the problems of general biology. 
