Impressions of great naturalists : reminiscences of Darwin, Huxley, Balfour, Cope and other / by Henry Fairfield Osborn ... illustrated with portraits.

  • Henry Fairfield Osborn
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Impressions of great naturalists : reminiscences of Darwin, Huxley, Balfour, Cope and other / by Henry Fairfield Osborn ... illustrated with portraits. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    age of twenty-one he went to London. He afterward regarded his difficulty in obtaining employment as a great turning-point in his career, “for otherwise,” he writes, “it seems very unlikely that I should ever have under¬ taken what at that time seemed rather a wild scheme, a journey to the almost unknown forests of the Amazon in order to observe nature and make a living by collecting.” In his autobiographic volumes of 1905, “My Life, a Record of Events and Opinions,” there is also an interesting sketch of his state of mind at this time. I do not think that at this formative period I could be said to have shown special superiority in any of the higher mental faculties, but I pos¬ sessed a strong desire to know the causes of things, a great love of beauty in form and color, and a considerable, but not excessive desire for order and arrangement in whatever I had to do. If I had one distinct mental faculty more prominent than another it was the power of correct reasoning from a review of the known facts in any case to the causes or laws which produced them, and also in detecting fallacies in the reasoning of other persons. Elsewhere in his autobiography he observes that whatever reputation in science, litera-
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