re or to
what they ought to be.

I was a reasonably good student in college, standing just within the
first tenth of my class, if I remember rightly; although I am not sure
whether this means the tenth of the whole number that entered or of
those that graduated. I was given a Phi Beta Kappa "key." My chief
interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to
out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific
man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type--a man like Hart
Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day. My father had from the
earliest days instilled into me the knowledge that I was to work and to
make my own way in the world, and I had always supposed that this meant
that I must enter business. But in my freshman year (he died when I was
a sophomore) he told me that if I wished to become a scientific man I
could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely
desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it
a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up
such a career and do non-remunerative work of value _if I intended to do
the very best work there was in me_; but that I must not dream of taking
it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have
always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I
must even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had
to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the
numerator, then I must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went
into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the
enjoyment that could accompany a money-making career, and must find my
pleasures elsewhere.

After this conversation I fully intended to make science my life-work. I
did not, for the simple reason that at that time Harvard, and I suppose
our other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal
naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature. They treated
biology as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope, a
science whose adherents were to spend their time in the study of minute
forms of marine life, or else in section-cutting and the study of the
tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. This attitude was,
no doubt, in part due to the fact that in most colleges then there was
a not always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German
universi