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
universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been
carried to an extreme; thoroughness in minutiae as the only end of study
had been erected into a fetish. There was a total failure to understand
the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists,
including what could be done by outdoor naturalists--the kind of work
which Hart Merriam and his assistants in the Biological Survey have
carried to such a high degree of perfection as regards North American
mammals. In the entirely proper desire to be thorough and to avoid
slipshod methods, the tendency was to treat as not serious, as
unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious
minuteness in the laboratory. My taste was specialized in a totally
different direction, and I had no more desire or ability to be a
microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly
I abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist. Doubtless this meant
that I really did not have the intense devotion to science which I
thought I had; for, if I had possessed such devotion, I would
have carved out a career for myself somehow without regard to
discouragements.