426 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
ADDRESS OF PROF. WILLIAM M. WARREN. 
Mr. President, — 
It was a liappy thought on the part of those who arranged for 
this memorial meeting, that the speakers should represent several 
• aspects of Professor Hyatt’s life and work. And certainly no 
retrospect of the life work of the man whose memory we are hon¬ 
oring to-night, can be complete without including his long term of 
service as Professor of biology in the College of liberal arts, Boston 
University. 
It was in 1877 that he assumed the responsibilities of the head of 
this department in our college curriculum, and he carried them unin¬ 
terruptedly until the time of his death. He organized the courses 
in biology and was himself a regular lecturer all through these 
twenty-four years. His able assistant, Mr. Van Vleck, was of his 
own choosing, and the methods of the department were entirely left 
to Professor Hyatt’s own determination. Thus in this part of 
his life work, it seems to me, we can find peculiarly free and 
untrammeled manifestation of Professor Hyatt’s capabilities and 
ideals as an instructor. 
In all the history of modern education there is hardly any fact of 
such significance for the development of science, both in the dis¬ 
semination of its best results among the educated classes and in the 
training of the young men from whose ranks science is ever taking 
new leaders and discoverers, as the utilization of scientists themselves 
as educators. It is eminently desirable that the discoverer shall be 
the teacher, on at least two accounts. In the first place, the scien¬ 
tist, as a teacher, enjoys the great advantage of having his knowl¬ 
edge at first hand. He is no middleman, taking with one hand 
what he dispenses with the other, indoctrinating his students into 
the same indirect knowledge that he has himself, the knowledge 
which is not of the thing itself but about the thing. He is rather 
like the surgeon at his clinic, who takes his students into his own 
serious work and lets them look for themselves at process and 
method and result. I shall never forget the enthusiasm and rever¬ 
ence that the biology students at the university in Jena felt for the 
man who was both Haeckel of the great world of science and Haeckel 
of the little world of their own university life. And a second reason 
