There is no joy like the joy of creative work. To my mind all great men
are creative, and among the greatest men are the creative naturalists
from Aristotle to Darwin, whose self-effacing lives and enduring works
are our most precious possessions. I like a naturalist better than a
scientist, because there is less of the ego in him, and in a naturalist
like Darwin the ego entirely disappears and through his vision we see
Nature with the least human aberration. These “Impressions” may show the
young and aspiring naturalists of our day that in the highest creative
vision there is the least of self and the most of Nature. In the twelve
lives chosen from the fifty-seven men and women of whom I have
written,[1] I include Roosevelt, Bryce and Butler because as intrepid
explorers and observers they show some of the highest qualities of the
naturalist.
I had the good fortune to lead my student life between 1873 and 1880
under the spiritual, moral, and intellectual influence of the great men
of the Victorian age, the poets Wordsworth and Tennyson, as well as the
natural philosophers Wallace, Darwin, Huxley, and Cope. The scientific
thought of the first half of the nineteenth century was permeated with
the theism of the Special Creation theory of the universe. In those
fateful days of intellectual doubt between the false theism of Special
Creation and the true theism of Evolution, I fortunately came under the
influence of a series of broad-minded teachers, of Arnold Guyot in
geology, of James McCosh in psychology and philosophy, of William M.
Sloane in the philosophy of Kant, of William H. Welch in anatomy and the
study of the Cell; of each of these incomparable teachers I like to
recall that “I too sat at the feet of Gamaliel.” McCosh numbered me in
his favorite group of “eager young men” with the embryonic geologist
Scott and the embryonic philosopher Ormond. Inspired with
self-confidence by him in 1878, I took up original research in
psychology and prepared a questionnaire on visual memory in co-operation
with Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, publishing four
psychological papers at the same time that I was writing my first
palæontological papers on fossil mammals discovered in the Rocky
Mountains in 1877–1878. This work also fitted me to write, ten years
later, “From the Greeks to Darwin,” my inaugural lectures in the
Columbia University Professorship of Biology, the first of a series of
volumes which I edited. While McCosh, to whom I dedicated this
philosophical work, was eager and impetuous and urged the beginning of
observation and research at once, Arnold Guyot, distinguished in the
glaciology of Switzerland, taught that the way of learning is long and
very arduous. I well recall the motto he gave me when I was groaning
over the interminable difficulties of preparing fossils, a motto derived
from Hippocrates and the patient Romans:
Art is long and difficult; criticism is short and easy.
This indeed is the message of Geology to the student mind and the
underlying reason why Charles Lyell, a geologist, became the master of
Charles Darwin, a biologist. Only from the eternal truths of the earth’s
past history can the immediate present of Life be understood.
Two of my eager Princeton comrades felt the need of anatomy as much as I
did, and without the aid of a teacher we started the dissection of a
fish, guided by Huxley’s “Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates.” This
laborious work on the porgy was followed by an anatomical escapade on
the limb of _Homo sapiens_, part of a human cadaver, in one of the
unused rooms of the Astronomical Observatory which we converted into a
dissecting-room. The venerable astronomer, Professor Stephen Alexander,
wondered at the source of the strange odors that filled the observatory,
but never discovered the cause! These untaught and surreptitious studies
in anatomy led to my coming, in the autumn of 1878, under one of the
greatest teachers of anatomy this country has produced, William H.
Welch, then a junior officer in the Bellevue Medical College. Fresh from
the leading laboratories of Germany, Welch used the Teutonic method I
had not known before, of introducing each of his discourses on the
various kinds of cells with an historical review of discovery, showing
how step by step one discovery in science leads to another. I felt for
the first time the inspiration of the special virtue of German research,
the most thorough and painstaking the world has ever known, the virtue
of _grundlichkeit_, of going to the very bottom of things. Thus were
drawing to a close my six American years when the question of whether I
should go to Germany or to England was decided by a letter from Kitchen
Parker, the distinguished English comparative anatomist and friend of
Huxley, who personally advised me to go to London to study under Huxley
and to Cambridge to study under Balfour.
Never shall I forget my first impression of Francis Maitland Balfour as
I met him in the great court of Trinity College of Cambridge, in the
spring of 1879, to apply for admission to his course in embryology. At
the time he was twenty-eight years of age and I was twenty-one. I felt
that I was in the presence of a superior being, of a type to which I
could never possibly attain, and I did not lose this impression
throughout the spring months in which he lectured on comparative
embryology at Cambridge and in which we enjoyed many long afternoons of
bicycle riding on the level roads of the Fens. I always felt that
Balfour lived in a higher atmosphere, in another dimension of
intellectual space. Not that he was aloof—far from it, for he was always
in closest and most generous touch with the minds of his students; he
made you feel that you had a mind and that your opinion and observation
were of value, although you knew all the while that your mind was still
embryonic and your opinions of the most tentative order. His was by far
the most balanced mind among all the English biologists. He was at the
time absorbed in embryology, which was the reigning biological
discipline of the day. His untimely death in the Swiss Alps in the year
1882 was a tragic loss, because English biologic thought soon entered
the long period of confusion and lack of balance that have characterized
it to the present time. The other great lesson taught by Balfour was
that of the balanced daily life: the morning lecture and tour of the
laboratory, the five quiet hours devoted to his own writing and
research, the vigorous afternoon exercise, and the delightful care-free
and shop-free evening. At the time Balfour was turning out the great
volumes of his “Comparative Embryology,” a monumental work, I asked him
how many hours a day he gave to writing; he replied: “Never more than
five hours.” A fresh mind is far more creative than a jaded mind.
In the autumn of 1879 I moved to London, which was then in the full and
glorious tide of Victorian life. Not a member had fallen out of the
great ranks. I had the good fortune to hear in the scientific societies
some of these great men, such as Clark Maxwell in physics, to meet all
the leading biologists except Wallace, and especially to come under the
commanding personal influence of Huxley. Huxley especially imparted
philosophic breadth, grasp of the whole subject, the force and value of
expression, the wisdom and perception that come from survey of a very
broad field, from both the philosophic and the anatomical standpoint.
His sense of humor was delightful and brightened many of the most
difficult passages in his discourses. By his way of living and by the
unlimited personal sacrifices he made he taught me that we men of
science must do our part in public education. To public service Huxley
sacrificed his life, for not long after his great lecture course of
1879–1880, which I attended and of which I took the fullest notes, he
broke down in health. When I last met him in Cambridge, at the British
Association meeting of 1894, he shook his head sadly and said: “Osborn,
I no longer can keep up with the progress of biology.” Soon after his
death, in 1895, I wrote the reminiscences which appear in this volume
without change.
To Huxley I owe the greatest biological impression that came to me in
England, namely, a few words with Charles Darwin in Huxley’s laboratory.
From the large number of students working there at the time, Huxley
singled me out, perhaps because I was the only American, perhaps because
of my early palæontological writing. I realized that I must make the
most of the opportunity, and for a few moments I gazed steadily into
Darwin’s face and especially into his benevolent blue eyes, which were
almost concealed below the overhanging brows, eyes that seemed to have a
vision of the entire living world and that gave one the impression of
translucent truthfulness. In my address at the Darwin Centenary at
Cambridge I endeavored to convey this profound impression of translucent
truthfulness. Darwin arrived at Evolution not because he desired to do
so, but because he was forced into it by his own observations of Nature.
He came of a long line of compellingly truthful ancestors, and certainly
“truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a distinctly
English and Scotch trait. In my fifty years’ experience with scientific
men I have found them neither more nor less truthful than other men,
because truthfulness does not go on all fours with genius, with powers
of observation and of generalization. Darwin always kept in the realm of
fact; he was equally sincere in the realm of opinion and of theory. If
in the relatively small part of his life that he devoted to speculation
and to theory his contributions are less permanent, it is because, after
all, Nature is unreasonable and irrational in her methods.
On returning to America as a young comparative anatomist I was
privileged to work as a comrade with men with whom I had started as a
disciple. I became more intimate than ever with the Scotchman James
McCosh and enjoyed his eager freshness of mind and desire to gain new
ideas. For a gift on his eightieth birthday his students paraphrased the
lines of Aristophanes: “Honor to the old man who in the declining vigor
of years seeks to learn new subjects and to add to his wisdom.” I had
great reverence for another Scotchman, James Bryce, with his enthusiasm,
his broad learning and experience, his eager reception of new ideas, to
the very end of his life; finally, for that very unique Scotchman, John
Muir. From their simple and hardy mode of living the Scotch contribute
to the students of life enduring impressions of energy, vigor,
youthfulness, and of the most genial and whole-hearted friendship.
In reprinting these “Impressions,” extending over a very long period of
years, from my youthful tribute to Balfour in 1883 to those of John
Muir, John Burroughs, Theodore Roosevelt, and Howard Crosby Butler in
the present decade, may I claim that years of observation have given me
far deeper penetration into the sources of human character and
personality? This penetration is due to my studies in heredity and my
observations on the difference in races and racial characteristics,
which, for example, separate the Scotch from the English and both from
the Irish. Such penetration is carried as far as I am able to do at
present in appreciation of the peculiar genius of John Muir and of John
Burroughs. In contrasting these two friends I asked myself the question:
“Why are they so much alike and why so different?” I believe I have
partly answered this question, but we may go much farther in the
sympathetic biographic analysis of the future. Since I wrote the first
of my biographic studies, the principal titles of which are included in
the appendix of this volume, I have been attempting to penetrate into
human nature along a number of paths: first, along studies of heredity,
already alluded to; second, along studies of the men of the Old Stone
Age and their forebears; third, with the increasing conviction that our
intellectual, moral, and spiritual reactions are extremely ancient and
that they have been built up not in hundreds but in thousands—perhaps
hundreds of thousands—of years. It would, however, take me far beyond
the limits of a foreword to enter upon this deeper interpretation of the
impressions and influences which great minds of great men of different
kinds have exerted upon me.
In these “Impressions” I am not in any case attempting to portray the
whole man, but only one principal aspect of each life. The nearest
approach to a full biographic treatment is the centenary address on the
life and works of Charles Darwin and the memorial address on his
comrade, Alfred Russel Wallace. It was an appreciation which I received
in a letter from Wallace, reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of
this volume, also letters from Mrs. Huxley and her son, from Lady Bryce,
and from friends of John Burroughs and John Muir that first led me to
believe that these biographical sketches would be helpful to young men
and young women who aspire to greatness along different lines of
intellectual endeavor. I have omitted many of my biographic essays
because I was not confident that they would be of interest to laymen as
well as to young scientists, to whom this work is addressed, but I
cannot pass by two of my great palæontological predecessors, Joseph
Leidy and Edward Drinker Cope, because the resemblances and contrasts
between these two men are especially illuminating in scientific life.
Cope was certainly the most brilliant creative mind in comparative
anatomy and evolution that America has produced. Quaker by birth, he was
a fighter by nature, both in theory and in fact. On one occasion, in the
American Philosophical Society, a difference of opinion with his friend
Persifor Frazer led to such a violent controversy that the two
scientists retired to the hallway and came to blows! On the following
morning I happened to meet Cope and could not help remarking on a
blackened eye. “Osborn,” he said, “don’t look at my eye. If you think my
eye is black, you ought to see Frazer this morning!” But such
differences of opinion did not sever the lifelong friendship, and when
Cope died Frazer was the first to pay a glowing tribute to his genius.
Cope was not a single but a multiple personality; he presents the widest
possible contrast to a retiring nature like that of Alfred Russel
Wallace, a sketch of whom opens this volume. Wallace, the last survivor
of the great trio of British naturalists of the nineteenth century,
survived by only a few months another member of the group, Sir Joseph
Hooker, who introduced the famous Darwin-Wallace papers on Natural
Selection to the Linnæan Society in 1858. Lyell, Darwin, and Wallace
were three successive but closely kindred spirits, whose work began and
ended with what will be known as the second great epoch of evolutionary
thought, the first being that of the precursors of Darwin and the third
that in which we live. They established Evolution through a continued
line of attack by precisely similar methods of observation and reasoning
over an extremely broad field.
As to the closeness of the intellectual sequence between these three
men, those who know the original edition of the second volume of Lyell’s
“The Principles of Geology,” published in 1832, must regard it as the
second biologic classic of the century—the first being Lamarck’s
“Philosophie Zoologique,” of 1809—on which Darwin through his higher and
much more creative vision built up his “Journal of Researches.” When
Lyell faltered in the application of his own principles Darwin went on
and was followed by Wallace. The two older men may be considered to have
united in guiding the mind of Wallace, because the young naturalist,
fourteen years the junior of Darwin, took both “The Principles” of Lyell
and “The Journal” of Darwin with him on his journey to South America,
during which his career fairly began.
From his record of observations during his life in the tropics of
America and of Asia Wallace will be remembered not only as one of the
independent discoverers of the theory of Natural Selection but next to
Darwin as one of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century. His
range and originality are astounding in these days of specialization.
His main lines of thought, although in many instances suggested to his
mind somewhat suddenly, were developed and presented in a deliberate and
masterly way through the series of papers and books extending from 1850
to 1913. The highest level of his creative life was, however, reached at
the age of thirty-five, when with Darwin he published his sketch of the
theory of Natural Selection. This outburst of original thought, on which
his reputation will chiefly rest, came as an almost automatic
generalization from his twelve years in the tropics.
The two most powerful men I have known intimately were J. Pierpont
Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt. I had the privilege of calling the former
“Uncle Pierpont” and have vivid recollections of him as he was in 1867,
when I was a boy, and in the last two brilliant decades of his life.
Theodore Roosevelt I knew slightly as a boy, as an intimate friend of my
naturalist brother, Frederick, and in the last two and great decades of
his life as my own friend. Although the man in the street would say that
no two Americans could be further apart than these two, in many
characteristics they were closely similar. The outstanding point of
likeness was their courage in facing obstacles, their dominance in
overcoming difficulties of all kinds. There was no “I can’t” in the
vocabulary of either man; rather “I can and I will.” Close contact with
both of these men enforced the life motto which became my own: _Whatever
is right can be done, and shall be done._ Powerful as both were in
leadership, they always sought the counsel of their friends and were apt
to be governed by it, unless it was the counsel of timidity or of
irresolution. Neither was dominant in the sense that Woodrow Wilson was
dominant and autistic—to use the professional phrase. Both won the
devoted friendship and admiration of hundreds of men and women, and both
made many enemies; through similar virtues Roosevelt became the opponent
of Morgan and Morgan became the opponent of Roosevelt. Both were
intensely patriotic and willing to make any sacrifice, however great,
for their country. Both were deeply religious and were guided by an
unfaltering faith in Divine Providence. The most surprising likeness I
observed was their humility; I never saw a trace of conceit in either
Pierpont Morgan or Theodore Roosevelt. The assurance and self-confidence
they both displayed in critical and commanding moments were part of the
great game of life. Leaders must have broad shoulders, firm necks, and
confident and determined faces when the world is full of doubting
Thomases, as it always is. A marked point of likeness was the power of
immediate, almost instantaneous, decision, which sometimes led both men
astray. Contrasting with their power of command were their simplicity,
their unselfish devotion to their friends, and their love of children
and fascination for children. Both had a deep interest in science; with
Morgan it was mathematics, minerals, and gems, and, in later years,
archæology. Natural history was the first and last love of Theodore
Roosevelt, in all its branches, and special study of birds and mammals
constituted the greatest pleasure of his life.
It will surprise many of my readers that I have instituted such a
comparison, that I have found resemblances amidst the many violent
contrasts in the lives and characters of these two great Americans. It
was the love of nature and of human nature which made them alike. Few of
us are single in our personalities; most of us are dual, and the rare
men like Morgan and Roosevelt are multiple. Among great naturalists
Wallace, Darwin, and Pasteur were men of single natures, whose whole
lives were devoted to single great purposes, to the attainment of which
all other objects in life gave way. They were neither combatant nor
militant, nor did they ever seek to force their theories or opinions by
militant methods. They sought seclusion, avoided public meetings and
controversies, and were astonished by the world-wide acclaim of their
discoveries. It is told of Darwin that after meeting Gladstone he
expressed surprise that such a very great man had paid him so much
attention. It appears that this simplicity of life and avoidance of
renown are most favorable to that creative state of mind which most
frequently engenders renown.
On the other hand, Huxley and Cope were, above all, combatants in the
new social and philosophical arena of Evolution. Huxley’s world-wide
fame rests partly on his defense of freedom of thought and of research
and on the brilliance of his rapier-like thrusts at some of the shams
and hypocrisies of the Special Creation exponents of his day. His genius
lay in polemics, in criticism, in exposition, rather than in creative
discovery and generalization; it is a striking fact that he did not add
a single new principle to the philosophy of Evolution. His life was one
of enforced activity and public service, which left him little or no
repose for creative thought, yet he added to anatomy a number of very
important generalizations. There is no measuring what Huxley might have
done if he had enjoyed the repose that was granted to Darwin. Cope was,
above all, a creative naturalist of a high order, with a rapidity and
originality of thought almost without parallel in the history of
anatomy; great generalizations affecting the order and arrangement of
the whole kingdom of backboned animals arose from his brain, while in
philosophical analysis he was a tyro where Huxley was a master.
From these impressions of the lives of many naturalists we see that the
naturalist is animated first of all by the joy of observation, without
initial hope or thought of discovery but surely in the end leading to
discovery; leading also to creative thought if observation is pursued
with a single eye and unfaltering purpose, regardless of all obstacles
or dangers and of the greatest impediment of all, namely, interest in
self and in self-advancement.