428 PROCEEDINGS: BOSTON SOCIETY NATURAL HISTORY. 
was many a variety of sponge that owed to Professor Hyatt its 
scientific existence and its very name. And when he mentioned 
ammonites and nautiloids we felt that he knew them through and 
through, straight, coiling, close coiled, and uncoiled, and had read 
in the sequence of their forms the larger principles by which facts 
are organized into science. In one of his dialogues Cicero mentions 
a man that spoke with such certitude that he seemed to have 
come direct from the council of the gods. We who were in 
Professor Hyatt’s classes did not feel exactly in this way about him, 
but we did feel that he had come direct from interviews with things 
themselves and that he had brought with him the certitude that 
comes as the reward of detailed study and comprehensive synthesis. 
And all this direct knowledge he knew how to employ to the 
student’s best advantage. He was wise in selection of that which 
is essential to a broad elementary course. In his style of teaching 
he was simple and direct, with no regard for needless forms. He 
knew how to make a thing plain, and how to use plain terms. I 
remember well how much more my own class was interested in 
what Professor Hyatt called fore-and-aft symmetry than it could 
have been in what with many another teacher would have been 
antero-posterior symmetry. Professor Hyatt actualized fully the 
second advantage of which we were speaking a moment ago. He 
brought into his class work and into the clear consciousness of his 
students the methods by which living science grows. He states in 
one of his prefaces, in a characteristically generous recognition of 
his indebtedness to his own greatest teacher, that he owed to 
Agassiz the methods of observation that were employed in all his 
work. Certainly he brought into his teaching much of the best 
that characterized Agassiz’s methods of instruction. 
Professor Hyatt was particularly happy also in escaping the 
dangers incident to combining the investigator and the instructor. 
I recently took up my notebook of the zoology course as given by 
him and Mr. Van Vleck jointly in 1885; and in reading its pages 
again after the lapse of these intervening years, I was struck with 
the skill and the breadth of view and the insight into students’ needs 
with which the course was planned and executed. The detailed 
facts were there, but the principles that they illustrate were there as 
well. There were minute studies and sketches, but never a study 
or a sketch that was not of structural significance in the course as a 
