Impressions of Great Naturalists: Reminiscences of Darwin, Huxley, Balfour, Cope, and others

Abstract

PROF. HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN, president of the American Museum of Natural History, distinguished especially for his palseontological researches, was one of Huxley's students and he also worked under Francis Balfour. He met Darwin and corresponded with Wallace; he was friendly with the combative Cope and very intimate with Roosevelt. So he has given us his impressions of these and others, selecting a dozen out of the fifty-seven “appreciations” which he has written in the course of his busy life. He has indulged his liking for trying to sum people up; and he has cultivated the gift, he tells us, by studies in heredity and racial characteristics and our ancestors of the Old Stone Age. For with his studies there has grown the 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. This palaeontographical line of thought is very suggestive; thus we think of Pasteur as the supreme avatar of the tanners, and of Roosevelt as the glorification of the hunters; but we do not find that Prof. Osborn has allowed it much expression in his book, unless in “the racial soul of John Burroughs.”

Impressions of Great Naturalists: Reminiscences of Darwin, Huxley, Balfour, Cope, and others.

By Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn. Pp. xxviii + 216 + 12 plates. (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924.) 12s. 6d. net.