Impressions of Great Naturalists

Part 1

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

MEN OF THE OLD STONE AGE THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE THE AGE OF MAMMALS EVOLUTION OF MAMMALIAN MOLAR TEETH FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN EVOLUTION AND RELIGION HUXLEY AND EDUCATION

IMPRESSIONS OF GREAT NATURALISTS

IMPRESSIONS OF GREAT NATURALISTS REMINISCENCES OF DARWIN, HUXLEY, BALFOUR, COPE AND OTHERS

HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

RESEARCH PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; SENIOR GEOLOGIST IN UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY; PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK · LONDON 1924

COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1924, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1924, BY SCIENCE COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY GINN AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1896, 1909, 1913, 1924, BY POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

Printed in the United States of America

TO THE MEMORY OF THE NATURALISTS, EXPLORERS, AND AUTHORS WHOSE CREATIVE LIVES ARE BRIEFLY TOUCHED UPON HERE

“... those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirr’d to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man’s search To vaster issues.” —GEORGE ELIOT

AUTOBIOGRAPHIC FOREWORD

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, 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.

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