Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/50

44 Williams College Expedition to Greenland and Labrador in 1860, and to him, many years later, he dedicated his book 'The Labrador Coast,' with grateful acknowledgment of the encouragement and many kindnesses he had received from him in early student days. Three years of graduate study (1861-64) with Louis Agassiz at Cambridge not only brought Packard under the influence of this great naturalist and scientific missionary to America, but brought him naturally into close touch with that older generation of 'lawgivers' who had passed away, but with whom Agassiz had worked; Oken, Humboldt, Cuvier Lamarck and St. Hilaire. The momentum gathered through the labors of these men in what we should call now general natural science was passed on through Agassiz to his many pupils who have rendered such splendid service to natural science in this country, Alexander Agassiz, Hyatt, Packard, Putnam, Morse, Wilder, Brooks, Verrill, Allen, Scudder, Whitman and Jordan.

To these young men American geology and the American fauna, living and extinct, offered extensive and rich choice in fields of research. Packard chose them all and has left his mark upon them all: geology; paleontology; systematic, structural and economic zoology; embryology, and even anthropology. At Cambridge while he was studying with Agassiz he was also pursuing a course in medicine—as Agassiz himself had done in Munich more than thirty years before—and received his S.B. from Harvard and his M.D. from Bowdoin (the Maine Medical School) in the same year, 1864. With respect to theoretical biology Agassiz's laboratory was an interesting place during this period following the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' Uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of organic evolution would have been impossible in view of Agassiz's attitude toward this 'notion. . . ever returning upon us with hydra-headed tenacity of life, and presenting itself under a new form as soon as the preceding one has been exploded and set aside. . . .' The theoretical phase of biology appealed strongly to Packard and to it he devoted much time and study, especially after the year 1870. He was an ardent admirer of Lamarck, adopted many of his ideas and applied them to new material; and with Cope and Hyatt founded the school of evolutionary thought for which he proposed the name Neo-Lamarckian. To all these subjects, except medicine, Packard contributed papers, memoirs, general books or text-books, and upon them all, except medicine, he lectured to his classes in Brown University.

His geological researches began with his student trip to Labrador in 1860. From these and later studies in Labrador (1864) several articles resulted; among them were the 'Glacial Phenomena of Maine and Labrador' (1866) and the book already referred to, 'The Labrador Coast' (1891). While assistant on the Maine Geological Survey