worked only with access to the marine fauna, and at that date there
were few facilities for seaside study in America. A true disciple of
Louis Agassiz, Professor Brooks saw the need of a marine laboratory,
and devoted himself, as Dohrn did at Naples, to the accomplishment of
an end so necessary for the advance of natural science. Encouraged by
the aid of a few citizens of Baltimore, in 1878 there was started an
experiment--"The Chesapeake Zoölogical Laboratory," at Fort Wool, Va.,
with Professor Brooks as director. With the absolute devotion of its
director to research as example, and with the liberal aid of the
trustees of the Johns Hopkins University, this laboratory became a
most important adjunct to the university and a virile center of
zoölogical study. So great was its success as a factor in the advance
of zoölogical knowledge that the trustees bravely continued to support
it whenever financial disaster did not rob them of the last penny. For
eight years in the Chesapeake, or in the remoter waters of North
Carolina, the station flourished; then, in 1886, we find the director,
with a few enthusiastic students, venturing in a small schooner to the
but little known Bahama Island, Green Turtle Cay, there to enlarge
their experiences with such delightful realization of naturalists'
dreams of the tropics as Haeckel experienced in his Journey to Ceylon.
Subsequent annual expeditions to Nassau, the Bemini Islands, and to
various parts of Jamaica served as marked eras in the lives of many
young naturalists who will not soon forget the contact with life thus
obtained.
From these sources and from his connection with the United States Fish
Commission, as director of the Marine Station at Woods Holl, Mass., in
1888, Professor Brooks drew inspiration and fact for the work and
thought by which he is so well known to the working naturalist. There
are few great divisions of the animal kingdom that have not excited
his special interest and claimed his long-sustained labor upon the
problems they express. Like McCrady, deeply fascinated by the
_Hydromedusæ_ and their wonderful changes, many smaller papers, as
well as the Memoir of the Boston Society of Natural History, entitled
The Life History of the _Hydromedusæ_ and the Origin of Alternation of
Generations, testify to his success in unraveling plots that thickened
with new discoveries.
An early interest in the mollusca, shown by his doctor's dissertation
upon the embryology of the fresh-water mussels, printed in part in the
Proceedings of the American Association, 1875, continued to be
expressed in his contributions to many problems in the embryology of
the fresh-water Pulmonates, of Gasteropods, of Lamellibranchs, and of
the Squid. The Crustacea also rightly claimed a large share of the
attention of a philosophic naturalist, bringing him face to face with
the rigid formulations of law which these creatures present. The
discovery of the very exceptional method of cleavage in the egg of the
decapod Lucifer, and the demonstration of the existence of a free
Nauplius stage there (published in the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society in 1882), marked a most important advance in the
morphological interpretation of all Crustacea, and brought its author
to the first rank as an authority upon this much-studied group.
Studying and capturing at Beaufort those phantom-like sand burrowers,
the Squilla, gained him an insight into and an interest in this
strange division of Crustacea that enabled him to undertake that
difficult task, the description of Stomatopods collected by the
Challenger Expedition--a task completed in 1886. The report, published
in such a magnificent series as only the British Government could have
consummated, is noticeable for the author's clear, free illustration
of the creatures described and classified. In it we find a
classification of the numerous, weird, glassy larvæ, agreeing with the
classification of the adults and marking the success of the solution
of the problem--the reference of chance collections of various stages
of many species to their proper places in the life history of each
species.
When the fever for ancestral trees had spread among naturalists in a
much more virulent form than that endemic in Wales, and when the
Ascidians were brought into line as ancestral vertebrates, it was no
wonder to find Professor Brooks laboring upon these interesting
creatures, but his work in this group started from a different point
of view. As early as 1875, when studying in the laboratory of
Alexander Agassiz, he contributed to the Boston Society of Natural
History a description involving a most novel interpretation of the
embryology of a remarkable Ascidian, Salpa. This form is known to many
not naturalists as that beautiful animal chain which is sometimes so
common in the clear waters of Newport Harbor as to be dipped up in
every bucket of water, but more often not there at all. The female
buds forth male branches and gives each an egg (which is fertilized to
form a second generation of females). There is thus no alteration of
sexual and non-sexual generations at all; and, with characteristic
appreciation of a paradox, Professor Brooks subsequently emphasized
the fact that the poet naturalist Chamisso, in discovering, in 1814,
"Alternation of Generations" in Salpa, had discovered a phenomenon
where it did not exist, though subsequently found common enough in
many other animals. With the continuity of interest so marked in him,
the life history of Salpa, as thus revealed, continued to be one of
the living thoughts in Professor Brooks's mind for a long period of
years, and, with the accumulation of material and results of
researches afforded by his summer work, culminated in the monograph
Salpa--a quarto of nearly four hundred pages and fifty odd
plates--published in 1893, or after nearly twenty years of sustained
interest in this complex problem. In this volume we find first a
coherent view of the intricate life history of this animal illuminated
by such metaphors as make the necessary technicalities both readable
and thinkable. For instance, "A chain of Salpa may be compared to two
chains of cars on two parallel tracks, placed so that the middle of
each car on one track is opposite the ends of two cars of the other
track, and each joined by two couplings to the car in front of it on
its own track, and in the same way to the one behind it, and also to
those diagonally in front of it and behind it on the other track."
Again, in speaking of that startling process of egg development that
makes the embryology of Salpa one of the apparently insoluble problems
of this branch of inquiry, he says: "Stated in a word, the most
remarkable peculiarity of the Salpa embryology is this: It is blocked
out in follicular cells, which form layers and undergo foldings and
other changes which result in an outline or model of all the general
features in the organization of the embryo. While these processes are
going on the development of the blastomeres is retarded, so that they
are carried into their final position in the embryo while still in a
rudimentary condition. Finally, when they reach the places they are
to occupy, they undergo rapid multiplication and growth and build up
the tissues of the body, while the scaffolding of follicle cells is
torn down and used up as food for the true embryonic cells. An
imaginary illustration may help to make the subject clear. Suppose
that while carpenters are building a house of wood the brick-makers
pile clay on the boards as they are carried past, and shape the lumps
of clay into bricks as they find them scattered through the building
where they have been carried with the boards. Now, as the house of
wood approaches completion, imagine the bricklayers build a brick
house over the wooden framework and not from the bottom upward, but
here and there wherever the bricks are to be found, and that as fast
as parts of the brick house are finished the wooden one is torn down.
To make the analogy complete we must imagine that all the structure
which is removed is assimilated by the bricks, and is thus turned into
the substance of new bricks to carry on the construction."
Following that descriptive portion of the work comes a most
interesting interweaving of facts gathered in wide experience with a
scientific imagination possible only to one who had lived and thought
in close sympathetic contact with tropical marine life. It is an
account of the present conditions of life along tropical shores and
the probable steps that led to the evolution of the innumerable
sedentary and creeping things from the ancestral forms that floated on
the surface of the ocean before there were shores. Charming reading
for the layman, and for the specialist a broadening poetic insight
into life as it is and as it was when the world was young and the
pelagic forbears of the vertebrates competed with their simpler
associates in the annexation of the bottom as a vantage ground for the
"benevolent assimilation" of later immigrants. The third portion of
the work follows a most commendable plan: "Scientific controversy is
so unprofitable that I shall try to make it as subordinate as
possible, that the reader may devote all his attention to the life
history of Salpa, without interruption at every point where my own
observations confirm or contradict the statements of others." This
section deals with the refutation of criticism of the author's
interpretations, and endeavors to harmonize the discords that in this,
as in all complex morphological research, make progress slow though
surer.
The above brief references to the research work of the subject of this
sketch would be too incomplete did we omit mention of his papers upon
that very interesting and extremely ancient inhabitant of the
Chesapeake, the Lingula, or of the beautifully illustrated memoir of
the National Academy of Sciences, describing the crania of the Lucayan
Indians, an unfortunate race of gentle beings discovered by the
Spaniards and treated as part of the live stock of the New World and
soon annihilated, leaving but a few bones, and, as Professor Brooks
tells us, our familiar and pleasant word "hammocks," as evidences of
their having been.
Coming to maturity in the period of general acceptance of the
Darwinian hypothesis of organic evolution, Professor Brooks was
naturally deeply influenced, and no one who has read his works can
doubt his allegiance to natural selection as a powerful factor in the
formation of the present order of living things. In the American
Naturalist for 1877 he published the first outlines of a provisional
hypothesis of pangenesis that sought to "combine the hypotheses of
Owen, Spencer, and Darwin in such a way as to escape the objections to
which each is in itself liable, and at the same time to retain all
that renders them valuable." In 1883 the same hypothesis--that
variations are perpetuated chiefly through the male line by special
gemmules, and that the female is essentially conservative--was
elaborated in book form under the title of The Law of Heredity.
Thenceforth, in intervals of research work, Professor Brooks has
contributed to various periodicals, notably the Popular Science
Monthly, such essays upon kindred topics as spontaneously arose in his
mind in connection with current work here and abroad. Some of these of
a general philosophical interest have been incorporated with lectures,
originally given to students in Baltimore, as The Foundations of
Zoölogy, brought out this year by the Macmillan Company as Volume V of
the Columbia University Biological Series. This, it will be noted, is
dedicated "To Hobart College, where I learned to study, and, I hope,
to profit by, but not blindly to follow, the writings of that great
thinker on the principles of science, George Berkeley," and its
keynote might be said to be difficult to hold, expressing the
standpoint of one who says "The proof that there is no necessary
antagonism between mechanical explanations of human life and belief in
volition and duty and moral responsibility seems to me to be very
simple and easy to understand."
Though thus active in pushing forward the limit of fact and theory in
the domain of pure science, Professor Brooks has not shirked the duty
that falls to every member of society, but has labored earnestly to
build a sound basis for immediate practical application of zoölogical
research. In 1876 he organized a summer zoölogical laboratory for
teachers and others in Cleveland, with the co-operation of two other
young Clevelanders--A. H. Tuttle, now Professor of Biology in the
University of Virginia, and I. B. Comstock, Professor of Geology in
the University of Arizona.
Identifying himself with the interests of the community in which he
had cast his lot, he interested himself in the establishment of such
educational influences as that of a public aquarium, and it was
through no fault of the sower that the seed laboriously sown fell upon
stony ground. In the winter of 1880 he gave a course of lectures and
of laboratory work for teachers in the schools of Baltimore.
Again, his early studies of the development of the oyster (for which
he was awarded the medal of the Société d'Acclimatisation of Paris in
1883), his discovery that the American oyster could be reared like
fish from artificially fertilized eggs, since he found it to have a
different life history from its European fellow, led him to realize
the greater possibilities that awaited our oyster industries when they
should be based upon scientific fact. Living amid a population
dependent to no small extent upon these industries, Professor Brooks
threw himself with enthusiasm into the problem of warding off the ruin
that comes to every enterprise expanding faster than its capital is
replenished, and eagerly sought the means to magnify without
deterioration so important a factor in the existence of the
Commonwealth. As chairman of the Oyster Commission appointed by the
General Assembly of Maryland in 1882, he drew up the long, detailed,
and well-illustrated report, issued in 1884, which set forth the
condition of the oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay and their
deterioration from overwork, and suggested a legislative remedy in the
form of a bill designed to remove this industry from that primitive,
barbaric stage in which our communal ownership of migrant birds and
fish still remains, and to place it upon the secure basis of personal
ownership underlying other live-stock business. But it is difficult to
change the customs of centuries' standing, and prophets rarely see the
fulfillment of their predictions. Many lectures and the issue of a
popular book--The Oyster, 1891--were necessary labors assumed by
Professor Brooks before the public mind was educated to some
appreciation of the nature of the problem, and the fruits of his
labors are yet to be matured and gathered.
But it is not so much by discovery of new facts or by aid to the
community in which one may chance to live that a man exerts his best
influence upon mankind; rather by his success in inspiring others to
see whatever of good there may be in his point of view and method of
attack upon old problems, that his followers may keep alive and
enlarge what he stands for in the growth of civilization. As a teacher
Professor Brooks has exerted a powerful influence by the stimulus of
example in his whole-hearted devotion to research, by originality of
suggestion, and by his clear intuition of the essential factors in
morphological problems. Convinced that naturalists, like poets, are
born and not made--or, if so, then self-made--his teaching has been
free from that too easily acquired hallucination that the forcible
introduction of facts, and frequent extraction of words by means of
examination, are a possible means to the making of zoölogists, or what
you will to order, to be ticketed and branded as such after a fixed
term of the above process. Those who are strong enough to grow in the
open have found in him a genial sunshine, but those needing hothouse
forcing have sometimes missed, perhaps, the care necessary to bring
them to a marketable state.
Many who have followed his lectures will recall the clearness and
simplicity with which complex and puzzling questions were presented to
their minds; the skull of the bony fish soon lost its terrors, while
the homologies of the limb bones were brought to the mind in a graphic
way, sure to leave a deep impression. Directness and lucidity, with
freedom from investment of unessentials, are characteristics of his
teaching and prominent features in his too little known Handbook of
Marine Zoölogy, which, despite technical faults, was so original and
honest, so free from closet natural history, that it marked an era in
the advance of biological instruction. It was a direct appeal to the
concrete study of living animals at a time when zoölogy for students
was still the learning of text-books, and text-books were too often in
spirit but modernizations of Pliny or of Aldrovandus.
It is this removal of the impeding paraphernalia of custom-bound
authority, and a direct, childlike communion with Nature in search of
truth by one's unaided labor, that this man has to offer to those who
come under his sway as teacher; with what success will be evident from
the work of those who recently united to honor his fiftieth birthday
with a portrait that might recall him to them as he taught them, and
from the work of those who, in coming years, will enjoy the privilege
of contact with his genius and be led to "seek admission to the temple
of natural knowledge naked and not ashamed, like little children."
* * * * *
FORESTRY, Professor Fernow said in his paper at the American
Association, is not, as it seems to be popularly believed,
"Woodman, spare that tree," but "Woodman, cut those trees
judiciously." The handling of a slowly maturing crop like forest
trees requires especial consideration of a problem quite unlike
any other that presents itself to the business man. The trees
ripen slowly, a full century often being necessary to the
complete development of growth. Obviously it would be inadvisable
to cut down the product and then wait a hundred years for further
income from the land; another system is necessary, where merely
the interest is taken, in trees which are in a condition to cut,
while the principal, the forest itself, remains always
practically intact.
Editor's Table.
_PRIMITIVE MAN._
Two articles contributed to the April and May numbers of the
Fortnightly Review by Mr. J. G. Frazer, the learned author of The
Golden Bough, and more recently of a monumental edition of Pausanias,
are worthy of the close attention of all who are interested in the
early history of mankind. The articles are entitled The Origin of
Totemism, and the object of the writer is to show that on this obscure
subject a flood of light has been shed by the lately published
researches of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen into the beliefs and
practices of the native tribes of central Australia, those tribes
being perhaps the best representatives now anywhere surviving of the
most primitive condition of the human race. Mr. Baldwin Spencer,
formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, is at present Professor
of Biology in the University of Melbourne, while Mr. Gillen is a
special magistrate in South Australia, charged with the protection of
the aborigines. In their work, Mr. Frazer observes, "We possess for
the first time a full and authentic account of thoroughly primitive
savages living in the totem stage and practically unaffected by
European influence. Its importance," he adds, "as a document of human
history can, therefore, hardly be overestimated."
Evolution, it has often been remarked, and is again remarked by the
writer of these articles, is an outcome of the struggle for life, and
is rapid and vigorous or slow and feeble, according to the intensity
of the struggle and the number and variety of the competing elements.
Among the great land masses of our planet Australia is the smallest;
and, owing to this circumstance, and also to its physical
conformation, which renders large areas unfit for the maintenance of
life, population has been much restricted and competition has been at
a minimum. Hence the extremely backward and undeveloped condition of
its native tribes, a condition which enables us, as Mr. Frazer
observes, to detect humanity in the chrysalis stage, and mark the
first blind gropings of our race after liberty and light.
The account given of these tribes contains indeed some very remarkable
details. For example, "though they suffer much from cold at night
under the frosty stars of the clear Australian heaven, the idea of
using as garments the warm furs of the wild animals they kill and eat
has never entered into their minds." They attribute the propagation of
the human race wholly to the action of spirits, to whom they attribute
a fecundating power, treating as wholly irrelevant to the matter any
contact of the sexes. The idea of natural causation seems to be one
which they have no power to grasp. They believe that various results
are dependent on special antecedent conditions, but it is a pure
matter of accident what they shall conceive the conditions in any case
to be. Here we come to the origin of totemism. Heretofore totemism has
been considered, broadly speaking, as the identification of themselves
by some group of savages with a particular plant or animal or other
manifestation of the powers of Nature, accompanied by a complete or
partial _taboo_, so far as the group in question is concerned, of the
animal or other object adopted as totem, and also by a rule
prohibiting marriage within the group. What Messrs. Spencer and Gillen
have succeeded in doing has been to observe and detect the
significance of certain practices of the Australian tribes which have
never been observed, or at least never understood, before.
At a certain time of the year, it appears, each totemistic tribe goes
through elaborate ceremonies of a purely magical character for the
purpose of promoting the growth and multiplication of the particular
animal or plant, if it be one useful for food, with which the tribe is
identified, or of antagonizing its evil effects if it be of a hurtful
character. As "there is scarcely an object, animate or inanimate, to
be found in the country occupied by the natives which does not give
its name to some totemic group of individuals," the general scheme of
things is pretty well looked after in the various ceremonies that are
practiced by the different groups. Attention is here drawn to the
essential difference between religion and magic, religion being an
attempt to propitiate or conciliate the higher powers, while magic
undertakes to coerce them. "To the magician," as Mr. Frazer observes,
"it is a matter of indifference whether the cosmic powers are
conscious or unconscious, spiritual or material; for in either case he
imagines that he can force them by his enchantments to do his
bidding." The ceremonies of the native Australians, as we have said,
are wholly magical. They have the same kind of faith in their
incantations and other strange performances that the modern man of
science has in the preparations he makes for a physical experiment.
The difference is that imagination or the crudest kind of symbolism
has suggested the methods of the savage, while a careful scrutiny and
comparison of facts has dictated those of the man of science. The
_proprium_ of the savage mind is an utter insensibility to evidence,
or rather a lack of all power of conceiving what evidence is, and
therefore a total incapacity for feeling any need of it. The
scientific man, on the other hand, feels that he needs it every hour
and every moment.
It may be interesting to quote the description given by Mr. Frazer,
after Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, of the ceremonies performed by the
men whose totem is the "witchetty grub," a creature much prized as an
article of diet by the natives.