istory, with
many short excursions into the realms of biology, embryology, botany,
geology and cosmogony.

Fiske was made assistant librarian at a salary of one thousand dollars a
year. It was not much money, but it gave him a fixed position, with time
to help the erring freshman and the mentally recalcitrant sophomore
handicapped by rich parents. For seven years Fiske held this position of
assistant librarian, and hardly a student at Harvard during those years
but acknowledged the personal help he received at the hands of John
Fiske. Knowledge consists in having an assistant librarian who knows
where to find the thing.

Fiske's thirty-five lectures had evolved into that excellent book,
"Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy." The public were buying it.

Evolution was fast taking its place as a fixed fact. And John Fiske was
moving into public favor on the flood-tide. There were demands for his
lectures from various schools, colleges and lyceums, throughout the
United States.

He resigned his position so as to give all his time to writing and
speaking. And Harvard, proud of her gifted son, elected him an Overseer
of the University, which position he held until his death. John Fiske
died in Nineteen Hundred One, suddenly, aged fifty-nine.

* * * * *

"Next to the originator of a great thought is the man who quotes it,"
says Ralph Waldo Emerson. Next to the discoverer of a great scientific
truth is the man who recognizes and upholds it. The service done science
by Fiske is beyond calculation. Fiske was not a Columbus upon the sea of
science: he followed the course laid out by others, and was really never
out of sight of a buoy. He comes as near being a great scientist,
perhaps, as any man that America has ever produced.

America has had but four men of unmistakable originality. These are:
Franklin, Emerson, Whitman and Edison. Each worked in a field
particularly his own, and the genius of each was recognized in Europe
before we were willing to acknowledge it here. But the word "scientist"
can hardly be properly applied to any of these men. For want of a better
name we call John Fiske our greatest scientist. He was the most learned
man of his day. In the realm of Physical Geography no American could
approach him. The combined knowledge of everybody else was his: he had a
passion for facts, a memory like a daybook, and his systematic mind was
disciplined until it was a regular Dewey card-index