Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899Various
Religion
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
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."
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