Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/425

Rh 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."

, 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 he 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.