Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/373

Rh reliable sister, morphology, supported by relative position and mode of development.

In 1866 Prof. Wyman was named one of the seven trustees of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology, and became curator. For this work he was peculiarly fitted, both by nature and by his extensive observations upon crania, and his frequent investigations of shell-heaps, etc., during the trips to Florida, which his health had of late years forced him to make. Our space will not permit even a brief sketch of his labors in this new field; the results are modestly recorded in his annual reports. At present, the Museum is very extensive and admirably arranged. Had Prof. Wyman been spared for another ten years, one can hardly predict its importance. Of this, and of his own anatomical collections, the value is wholly out of proportion to the size or actual cost in money, for they represent the constant and skillful labor of a great anatomist during a quarter of a century. The label upon every specimen tells the truth so far as he knew it; and in the descriptive catalogues are rich treasures of fact and thought as yet unrevealed.

Prof. Wyman always shrank from public notice, and from positions in which this was involved. He attended several meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and served therein as president, treasurer, and secretary. But his communications were few, and comparatively unimportant. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named by Congress one of the original fifty members of the National Academy of Science, but soon resigned. In strong contrast with his slender relations with these organizations is his record in connection with the Boston Society of Natural History. He early became an ardent member, served as secretary, and as curator of several departments, and in 1856 became president. This office he held until 1870, when he offered an unqualified resignation.

Meagre as is the above account of his outer life, we shrink yet more from any such estimate of his abilities and his personal character as the present occasion will permit. Admired and trusted by his associates, by the younger naturalists he was absolutely adored. Ever ready with information, with counsel and encouragement, so far from assuming toward them the attitude of a superior, he on several occasions permitted his original observations to be more or less merged within their productions. The universal regard in which he was held by them is, in the writer's case, intensified by the sense of peculiar obligations, which might cloud his judgment of any ordinary man; but to no man more fitly than to Wyman could be addressed the lines: