82 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
difficulty with the ductless glands — they would not classify in a way 
to suit him. Twenty-one years later in a presidential address before 
the American Association of Anatomists, he returns to the same 
problem. The example is trifling but serves to show how the problems 
to which he attended in his later years had been considered earlier. 
To contrive a clear and faithful outline of the work of Minot is no 
easy task, for he was a whole soul with the full range of human interests 
and sympathies. To the man in the street he was that w^eird thing 
called a specialist ; in the classified lists he was an embryologist. As a 
matter of fact he was a naturalist or biologist in the broadest sense. 
The true specialist focuses the entire light of knowledge, so far as he 
can command and use it, on some particular field in which he person- 
ally works and concerning which all details have a value for him. Of 
course he runs the danger of being drawn down in the whirl of his special 
activities, but if he avoids this ever-present menace, then all of the 
larger problems of his time gain added meanings. Minot achieved 
this relation to his special interests. Thus he appears not only as an 
investigator of biological problems, a writer of advanced text-books, 
but also as a contributor to laboratory arrangements and construction, 
a champion of educational ideals, both technical and general, and an 
active worker in the cooperative organization of science, both in this 
country and abroad. It was the program of a mind that never ceased 
to grow. 
In the very nature of things these manifold activities are the ex- 
pressions of a central purpose following a simple plan. 
It is a familiar experience to have a friend who has been laboring to 
explain his written words, push back the papers and with the tone of 
one who shifts the level of his thought, say, " What I had in mind was 
this." The incident serves to show how hard it is to reveal the under- 
lying thought and purpose of one's work. Yet it is just this thing, 
the thing " he had in mind," which we need to guide us in the study of 
the man whose work we seek to follow. 
The stems of certain plants stretch forth beneath the surface of the 
ground but now and then send up a shoot, to form a leaf or flower in 
full view. These outgrowths mark the presence of the unseen source 
and reveal the activities of which they are the natural expression. We 
know too well that we never can observe this stem-like growth in the 
minds about us, but only the occasional expressions which take so 
many forms; yet it must be in the terms of this relation alone that we 
may seek to learn the inner meaning of another's life. 
