84 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
tion has the value of a great text-book on comparative embryology, 
with this peculiar virtue, that every one who reads it makes his own 
edition, so that it is never out of date. 
Under conditions which he always sought to improve, Minot had as 
one prime object of his teaching, to make his students observe. 
Huxley somewhere remarked that what a man saw when he looked 
through a microscope often depended more on what was behind his 
eye than on what was in front of it. Huxley was pleading for the 
intellectual element in science. But I quote this scientific scripture 
for a purpose other than that which its author had in mind. Minot 
found, as who does not, the statement all too true, but labored long 
and painfully to make his students, for the time at least, neglect what 
was behind and see only that which was before their eyes: the whole 
thing and nothing but that thing. This has always been the method 
of great teachers in science, and that famous herring by which Louis 
Agassiz was wont to test the latent powers of his would-be students is, 
in a way, the most precious specimen the Museum of Comparative 
Zoology ever had. 
It was not only in his own laboratory that Minot served as teacher. 
This influence was extended through the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, through the Marine Biological Laboratory, 
and through the Society in whose hall we meet to-night — to name but 
three from many instances. 
Some may recall too, his interesting and instructive studies, when 
in the later eighties psychical research was in the air, studies based on 
the number habits he revealed (1886) and on the diagram tests (1889) 
by which he showed the appalling lack of originality in the average 
man when he was asked to draw something. Both these studies 
helped to put this line of experimentation on a sounder basis, for he 
used a classic method in this work: he c[uestioned — and found 
wanting — the very premises which were then in vogue. In one of his 
many addresses before the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science (the one "On the method of science," 1911) he touches on 
this point. Speaking of the dangers which beset all scientific work, he 
says, " The difficulties and the majority of failures are due, it seems to 
me, to two chief causes; the first, inadeciuate determination of the 
premises, the second, exaggerated confidence in the conclusions." 
If now we turn to Minot's scientific career in the stricter sense, a 
curious light is thrown on academic titles bv his record. 
I 
