here only of the two older brothers, Josiah Dwight, the famous geologist, and our own William Dwight, the philologist, of whom it is a curious fact that the geologist brother attended Sanskrit lectures in Berlin, while the younger philologist, on graduating from Williams College at the age of eighteen, with the valedictory rank, began collecting birds and plants, and soon after was taken by his eminent brother as his assistant on a United States Geological Survey of the Lake Superior region, having charge of the botany and barometrical observations. It was about this time that he found some Sanskrit books in his brother's library, and his attention was first directed to what was to prove the main pursuit of his life. The geologist came very near turning out a philologist, while it was a narrow chance which prevented the philologist from becoming an authority in geology or biology.
When Nature has given a man the mind-stuff, it makes all the difference in the world how he develops it. I doubt very much if tastes or aptitudes for specific lines of study are inherited. I think they rather come from training. They are the result of the influences by which we are environed, or of the drift of study into which we fall. It was no injury to the boy graduate of Williams College that he had acquired no special tastes. He had a powerful and alert mind, and everything was meat and drink to it. In everything he excelled. In these days of early specialization we may not err in directing the ordinarily bright mind, from which we expect useful second-class work, into fields where intensity is cultivated at the expense of extension; but this is
