92 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
in the soundness of his own reasoning, and in the justice of the cause 
or movement he had espoused. He was upright in every sense of that 
word. His loyalty was firm and undeviating, whether to an ideal, or a 
person, or to an institution; and affection or devotion, once planted 
in his breast, held for good and all. 
His book on Human Embryology, published in 1892, made him 
famous throughout the learned world; so that he was elected to 
learned societies in Great Britain, Italy, France, Germany, and 
Belgium, as well as to all appropriate American societies. He also 
received honorary degrees from the Universities of St. Andrews 
(Scotland), Oxford (England), Toronto (Canada), and Yale. He 
enjoyed calmly and simply the honors thus paid to his scientific 
achievements and services by well-informed and impartial judges. 
In 1912-'13 he was Harvard Exchange Professor at the Universities 
of Berlin and Jena, where he gladly availed himself of many oppor- 
tunities to expound to his German colleagues the advances in Natural 
History, including Medicine, which were due to American investiga- 
tors. His hair and beard were now whitening; but he felt all the 
ardors of youth, and among them a fervid patriotism. 
In scientific investigation Minot showed imagination, penetration 
and eagerness, but also caution. In 1907, he gave a course of lectures 
at the Lowell Institute on "Age, Growth, and Death," and made 
them the basis of a book published in the following year. For him, 
the subject meant cell metamorphosis, — a subject with which he had 
been familiar through all his studies in Histology and Embryology; 
but what he sought in this study of "Age, Growth, and Death" was a 
scientific solution of the problem of old age which should have "in 
our minds the character of a safe, sound, and trustworthy biological 
conclusion." He ventured to think that some contemporary stu- 
dents of the phenomena of longevity had failed to exercise sufficient 
caution in forming their opinions. Nevertheless, Minot was a scientific 
optimist, full of hope for perpetual progress, and for useful results at 
many stages of the long way. These characteristics appear clearly 
in the following passage, taken from the first of that course of Lowell 
Lectures : — 
" I hope, before I finish, to convince you that we are already able 
to establish certain significant generalisations as to what is essential in 
the change from j^outh to old age, and that in consequence of these 
generalisations, now possible to us, new problems present themselves 
