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,^[1] 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:

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.

To Huxley I owe the greatest biological impression that came to me in England, namely, a few words with Charles Darwin in Huxley’s laboratory. From the large number of students working there at the time, Huxley singled me out, perhaps because I was the only American, perhaps because of my early palæontological writing. I realized that I must make the most of the opportunity, and for a few moments I gazed steadily into Darwin’s face and especially into his benevolent blue eyes, which were almost concealed below the overhanging brows, eyes that seemed to have a vision of the entire living world and that gave one the impression of translucent truthfulness. In my address at the Darwin Centenary at Cambridge I endeavored to convey this profound impression of translucent truthfulness. Darwin arrived at Evolution not because he desired to do so, but because he was forced into it by his own observations of Nature. He came of a long line of compellingly truthful ancestors, and certainly “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a distinctly English and Scotch trait. In my fifty years’ experience with scientific men I have found them neither more nor less truthful than other men, because truthfulness does not go on all fours with genius, with powers of observation and of generalization. Darwin always kept in the realm of fact; he was equally sincere in the realm of opinion and of theory. If in the relatively small part of his life that he devoted to speculation and to theory his contributions are less permanent, it is because, after all, Nature is unreasonable and irrational in her methods.

On returning to America as a young comparative anatomist I was privileged to work as a comrade with men with whom I had started as a disciple. I became more intimate than ever with the Scotchman James McCosh and enjoyed his eager freshness of mind and desire to gain new ideas. For a gift on his eightieth birthday his students paraphrased the lines of Aristophanes: “Honor to the old man who in the declining vigor of years seeks to learn new subjects and to add to his wisdom.” I had great reverence for another Scotchman, James Bryce, with his enthusiasm, his broad learning and experience, his eager reception of new ideas, to the very end of his life; finally, for that very unique Scotchman, John Muir. From their simple and hardy mode of living the Scotch contribute to the students of life enduring impressions of energy, vigor, youthfulness, and of the most genial and whole-hearted friendship.

In reprinting these “Impressions,” extending over a very long period of years, from my youthful tribute to Balfour in 1883 to those of John Muir, John Burroughs, Theodore Roosevelt, and Howard Crosby Butler in the present decade, may I claim that years of observation have given me far deeper penetration into the sources of human character and personality? This penetration is due to my studies in heredity and my observations on the difference in races and racial characteristics, which, for example, separate the Scotch from the English and both from the Irish. Such penetration is carried as far as I am able to do at present in appreciation of the peculiar genius of John Muir and of John Burroughs. In contrasting these two friends I asked myself the question: “Why are they so much alike and why so different?” I believe I have partly answered this question, but we may go much farther in the sympathetic biographic analysis of the future. Since I wrote the first of my biographic studies, the principal titles of which are included in the appendix of this volume, I have been attempting to penetrate into human nature along a number of paths: first, along studies of heredity, already alluded to; second, along studies of the men of the Old Stone Age and their forebears; third, with the increasing conviction that our intellectual, moral, and spiritual reactions are extremely ancient and that they have been built up not in hundreds but in thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of years. It would, however, take me far beyond the limits of a foreword to enter upon this deeper interpretation of the impressions and influences which great minds of great men of different kinds have exerted upon me.

In these “Impressions” I am not in any case attempting to portray the whole man, but only one principal aspect of each life. The nearest approach to a full biographic treatment is the centenary address on the life and works of Charles Darwin and the memorial address on his comrade, Alfred Russel Wallace. It was an appreciation which I received in a letter from Wallace, reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of this volume, also letters from Mrs. Huxley and her son, from Lady Bryce, and from friends of John Burroughs and John Muir that first led me to believe that these biographical sketches would be helpful to young men and young women who aspire to greatness along different lines of intellectual endeavor. I have omitted many of my biographic essays because I was not confident that they would be of interest to laymen as well as to young scientists, to whom this work is addressed, but I cannot pass by two of my great palæontological predecessors, Joseph Leidy and Edward Drinker Cope, because the resemblances and contrasts between these two men are especially illuminating in scientific life.

Cope was certainly the most brilliant creative mind in comparative anatomy and evolution that America has produced. Quaker by birth, he was a fighter by nature, both in theory and in fact. On one occasion, in the American Philosophical Society, a difference of opinion with his friend Persifor Frazer led to such a violent controversy that the two scientists retired to the hallway and came to blows! On the following morning I happened to meet Cope and could not help remarking on a blackened eye. “Osborn,” he said, “don’t look at my eye. If you think my eye is black, you ought to see Frazer this morning!” But such differences of opinion did not sever the lifelong friendship, and when Cope died Frazer was the first to pay a glowing tribute to his genius. Cope was not a single but a multiple personality; he presents the widest possible contrast to a retiring nature like that of Alfred Russel Wallace, a sketch of whom opens this volume. Wallace, the last survivor of the great trio of British naturalists of the nineteenth century, survived by only a few months another member of the group, Sir Joseph Hooker, who introduced the famous Darwin-Wallace papers on Natural Selection to the Linnæan Society in 1858. Lyell, Darwin, and Wallace were three successive but closely kindred spirits, whose work began and ended with what will be known as the second great epoch of evolutionary thought, the first being that of the precursors of Darwin and the third that in which we live. They established Evolution through a continued line of attack by precisely similar methods of observation and reasoning over an extremely broad field.

As to the closeness of the intellectual sequence between these three men, those who know the original edition of the second volume of Lyell’s “The Principles of Geology,” published in 1832, must regard it as the second biologic classic of the century—the first being Lamarck’s “Philosophie Zoologique,” of 1809—on which Darwin through his higher and much more creative vision built up his “Journal of Researches.” When Lyell faltered in the application of his own principles Darwin went on and was followed by Wallace. The two older men may be considered to have united in guiding the mind of Wallace, because the young naturalist, fourteen years the junior of Darwin, took both “The Principles” of Lyell and “The Journal” of Darwin with him on his journey to South America, during which his career fairly began.

From his record of observations during his life in the tropics of America and of Asia Wallace will be remembered not only as one of the independent discoverers of the theory of Natural Selection but next to Darwin as one of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century. His range and originality are astounding in these days of specialization. His main lines of thought, although in many instances suggested to his mind somewhat suddenly, were developed and presented in a deliberate and masterly way through the series of papers and books extending from 1850 to 1913. The highest level of his creative life was, however, reached at the age of thirty-five, when with Darwin he published his sketch of the theory of Natural Selection. This outburst of original thought, on which his reputation will chiefly rest, came as an almost automatic generalization from his twelve years in the tropics.

The two most powerful men I have known intimately were J. Pierpont Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt. I had the privilege of calling the former “Uncle Pierpont” and have vivid recollections of him as he was in 1867, when I was a boy, and in the last two brilliant decades of his life. Theodore Roosevelt I knew slightly as a boy, as an intimate friend of my naturalist brother, Frederick, and in the last two and great decades of his life as my own friend. Although the man in the street would say that no two Americans could be further apart than these two, in many characteristics they were closely similar. The outstanding point of likeness was their courage in facing obstacles, their dominance in overcoming difficulties of all kinds. There was no “I can’t” in the vocabulary of either man; rather “I can and I will.” Close contact with both of these men enforced the life motto which became my own: Whatever is right can be done, and shall be done. Powerful as both were in leadership, they always sought the counsel of their friends and were apt to be governed by it, unless it was the counsel of timidity or of irresolution. Neither was dominant in the sense that Woodrow Wilson was dominant and autistic—to use the professional phrase. Both won the devoted friendship and admiration of hundreds of men and women, and both made many enemies; through similar virtues Roosevelt became the opponent of Morgan and Morgan became the opponent of Roosevelt. Both were intensely patriotic and willing to make any sacrifice, however great, for their country. Both were deeply religious and were guided by an unfaltering faith in Divine Providence. The most surprising likeness I observed was their humility; I never saw a trace of conceit in either Pierpont Morgan or Theodore Roosevelt. The assurance and self-confidence they both displayed in critical and commanding moments were part of the great game of life. Leaders must have broad shoulders, firm necks, and confident and determined faces when the world is full of doubting Thomases, as it always is. A marked point of likeness was the power of immediate, almost instantaneous, decision, which sometimes led both men astray. Contrasting with their power of command were their simplicity, their unselfish devotion to their friends, and their love of children and fascination for children. Both had a deep interest in science; with Morgan it was mathematics, minerals, and gems, and, in later years, archæology. Natural history was the first and last love of Theodore Roosevelt, in all its branches, and special study of birds and mammals constituted the greatest pleasure of his life.

It will surprise many of my readers that I have instituted such a comparison, that I have found resemblances amidst the many violent contrasts in the lives and characters of these two great Americans. It was the love of nature and of human nature which made them alike. Few of us are single in our personalities; most of us are dual, and the rare men like Morgan and Roosevelt are multiple. Among great naturalists Wallace, Darwin, and Pasteur were men of single natures, whose whole lives were devoted to single great purposes, to the attainment of which all other objects in life gave way. They were neither combatant nor militant, nor did they ever seek to force their theories or opinions by militant methods. They sought seclusion, avoided public meetings and controversies, and were astonished by the world-wide acclaim of their discoveries. It is told of Darwin that after meeting Gladstone he expressed surprise that such a very great man had paid him so much attention. It appears that this simplicity of life and avoidance of renown are most favorable to that creative state of mind which most frequently engenders renown.

On the other hand, Huxley and Cope were, above all, combatants in the new social and philosophical arena of Evolution. Huxley’s world-wide fame rests partly on his defense of freedom of thought and of research and on the brilliance of his rapier-like thrusts at some of the shams and hypocrisies of the Special Creation exponents of his day. His genius lay in polemics, in criticism, in exposition, rather than in creative discovery and generalization; it is a striking fact that he did not add a single new principle to the philosophy of Evolution. His life was one of enforced activity and public service, which left him little or no repose for creative thought, yet he added to anatomy a number of very important generalizations. There is no measuring what Huxley might have done if he had enjoyed the repose that was granted to Darwin. Cope was, above all, a creative naturalist of a high order, with a rapidity and originality of thought almost without parallel in the history of anatomy; great generalizations affecting the order and arrangement of the whole kingdom of backboned animals arose from his brain, while in philosophical analysis he was a tyro where Huxley was a master.

From these impressions of the lives of many naturalists we see that the naturalist is animated first of all by the joy of observation, without initial hope or thought of discovery but surely in the end leading to discovery; leading also to creative thought if observation is pursued with a single eye and unfaltering purpose, regardless of all obstacles or dangers and of the greatest impediment of all, namely, interest in self and in self-advancement.