ties. 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.

As regards political economy, I was of course while in college taught
the _laissez-faire_ doctrines--one of them being free trade--then
accepted as canonical. Most American boys of my age were taught both by
their surroundings and by their studies certain principles which were
very valuable from the standpoint of National interest, and certain
others which were very much the reverse. The political economists were
not especially to blame for this; it was the general attitude of the
writers who wrote for us of that generation. Take my beloved _Our Young
Folks_, the magazine of which I have already spoken, and which taught
me much more than any of my text-books. Everything in this magazine
instilled the individual virtues, and the necessity of character as the
chief factor in any man's success--a teaching in which I now believe as
sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will
never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the
right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of
insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of
the rights of others. All this individual morality I was taught by the
books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was
almost no teaching of the