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
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."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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