D

the "Hand of God"?

"Reach"-is that perhaps the most significant word in the whole history of man? Did the species below man reach to develop him and the brain with which he has remolded the universe nearer to his heart's desire? The stretch upward of his fore limbs, the coming of the hand, the division of the fingers to increase his reach and strengthen his grasp are these the miracle-working agents which finally lifted from myriad menageries of inarticulate experiment, the mind of man?

To reveal the biologic past of man has been the spur to the lifelong investigations of Frederick Tilney, head of the Neurological Department of Columbia University and fellow of the Galton Society of America. His findings and his view of the inevitable direction which they take, he is now publishing in "The Brain from Ape to Man." If one dare put a scientist's belief into a sentence it might be said that Tilney has put a vast amount of proof together to show that man actually has lifted himself up by his bootstraps from simian stock. Darwin believed that apes and men branched from the

man evolved from our common ancestor's use of arm and hand and foot.

With the urge toward safety and sunlight which carried the primates up into the arboreal world, there was founded that kingdom of the cortex from which eventually man was to rule earth, sea and sky. For it was, Tilney shows, when the eye began to coördinate movement—with reach, with leap, with spring and graspthat the little gray periphery of the marrow of our skull became consciousness.

In a dusty little office behind a lecture hall at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, you will find the proof. Along its walls in a library of cases are layers upon layers of microscopic sections of monkeys' and chimpanzees' and human brains-the brain of the famous gorilla, John Daniel, is among them. The room is redolent of formalin and holds only one impressive instrument, a great magnifying projector which multiplies the size of the section slipped into it as many fold as desired and throws the picture on a sheet of paper. From the picture on the paper a wax sheet is cut, and finally all the sheets that constitute a single brain are welded together.

By this means the Bourne method means—the —magnified wax reproductions of the brains Doctor Tilney has used, have been rebuilt. These models clearly show the gradual growth of man's cerebrum from the beginning of the primate's hand.

In the outwardly unimpressive library of show-cases in this study, are the sections of brains which Doctor Tilney has made or directed made for the last fifteen years. The time and labor they represent are indicated by the fact that it took a year to cut and mount a human brain in 5000 sections. Besides Besides mammalian brains the collection also contains 100 brains of birds, reptiles and amphibians.

With the utmost painstaking, Tilney has presented in "The Brain from Ape to Man" every representative of every species of the long grade upward. Beginning with the lower primates, through intermediates, higher primates and primitive man, he has gone into a complete and detailed description of brain structure as well as the behavior of lemurs, marmosets, baboons, gibbons, orang-outangs, chimpanzees, gorillas and man.

No more valid witness of this fact may be had than the statement of Henry Fairfield Osborn in the foreword of the book: "This volume contains the basis of what to our knowledge is the first profound study of the genesis of the intimate or internal structure of the human brain in comparison with the brains of animals more or less nearly related to man. It is a summary of Frederick Tilney's lifework along largely new and original paths, pursued with the most unremitting intelligence and

energy and yielding a result of exceptional breadth, precision and exactitude which affords a new and strong ground on which neurologists, psychologists, pathologists and students of animal and human behavior may advance further into the unknown."

The urge compelling a man to put the best of his life and imagination. into such an investigation is only less fascinating than the riddle he seeks to solve. The driving power behind the work recorded in "The Brain from Ape to Man," its author says, was simply the evolution of a desire.

22

Frederick Tilney comes of predominantly Scotch parentage. The rugged Scotch character and speculative temperament is, in him, remarkably combined with the scientific spirit. His zest to guess the beginnings of conscious life is not less than his capacity for indefatigable labor to check the guess with every available fact. Yet he is the very antithesis of the laboratory slave, for it is his warm interest in life and its meanings which sharpens his eagerness to discover truth.

Tilney is big and his head has a generous expanse of temple. The great arch of his eyebrows with the quiet discernment of his untroubled eyes truly represent his rare combination of philosophical vision with scientific method. And the breadth of his shoulders and span of his chest have an effect of re-emphasizing the breadth and openness of his mind.

Now a richly open mind can develop in the rigidest rows of tradition, provided only it be intellectual tradition. The atmosphere of Til

was particularly puritanical, eveD for the seventies of the last century. The family were members of Henry Ward Beecher's congregation and Tilney's grandmother was a red hot Beecherite. Not only was the entire household tremendously religious, but in characteristic Scotch fashion, found theological discussion the meat and drink of mental life. On this feast of doctrine the boy grew up mentally vigorous and inquisitive, at the same time coming into an exceptionally sturdy Scotch physical inheritance.

His father, a Yale graduate, was a lawyer and writer. He was no great success in the law for the reason, his distinguished son believes, that he was cut out for a dominie. This richer talent, of inspired teacher, the world did not enjoy, but his family was immeasurably benefited by it. While he was a boy Frederick Tilney quite naturally conformed to the views of his father and of the great Brooklyn preacher whose church they attended. But the boy's mind already was reaching out when Beecher was followed by Lyman Abbott, of whom Tilney still thinks as a real saint and philosopher. Abbott was not orthodox, but an exponent of the "higher criticism." So in his teens and before he went to college, Tilney's independent thought was stimulated. An old copy of Darwin's "Origin of Species" which he discovered on the otherwise untainted book-shelves of the Tilney home, impressed him so deeply that he read and reread the book in spite of the fact that he didn't fully comprehend its scientific content. He used to talk of the book to his father,

wouldn't swallow buncombe and never dogmatically opposed Darwin's thesis. He simply said, “It may be true, but I like the old faith better." The tendency to question the time honored dogmas was further strengthened when Tilney's uncle, a chaplain in the navy, contributed to the family discussions. The chaplain didn't openly avow free thought, but "he had a great deal of time to think," says Tilney, "and privately I suspect him of having brought the 'Origin of Species' into the house."

These experiences, the common lot of youth of the period, went peculiarly deep for Tilney, both on account of the exceptionally fervent faith in which he was trained and because of his keen intellectual curiosity. Filial love held him back; inherited mental bravery goaded him forward. And he suffered an acute crisis in early adolescence. He went He went to college, foundering religiously and spiritually. He had lost the satisfaction and pleasure of profound religious faith without gaining anything in its place.

Unanchored and adrift he tried to dismiss the questions which were his deepest concern, and turned to writing and reading. He wrote for the leading college periodical and finally became its editor. Thus when he was graduated from college he felt he really had found a new goddess to serve and he went to work on the "New York Sun." But he had not tried reporting long before he began to feel an inadequacy in the cub's rounds of police headquarters, hospitals and the like. It was a hand-to-mouth spiritual existence, running to fires and running back to

press. In this active and virile life there was no room for the search for pure truth. Tilney had entered it from the sequestered idealism of lecture halls where he had looked upon literature as a goddess and the Sun as her holy of holies. He talked it over with his city editor who, when he understood Tilney's spiritual unrest, advised him to go back to college and medicine.

During his medical course the old questions came alive again. Here the continuous looking for causes led him inevitably to the eternal question of the origin of life. "Dissection," says Tilney, "opens the mind if anything can. And I selected the brain as most likely to answer my questions."

But another suspension of work at the problems nearest his heart was to come when he went abroad for further medical study. For in Europe he found all emphasis placed on the practical aspect of medicine. To him the men there seemed definitely tainted with utilitarianism. They gave their lives and thought to the little deviations that produce disease, and wilfully ignored life as a great biological process. Nevertheless their very absorption in the minutiæ of clinical evidence gave the best possible training to a man who wanted to check with every findable fact his investigations into the secret of human origin.

But he found no department waiting to welcome him and his question. In the end he was advised to take his problem to the late George Sumner Huntington. One hot October day Tilney burst into the College of Physicians and Surgeons and asked for Doctor Huntington. Perhaps his deep earnestness or the perplexity of his spirit made the younger man appear somewhat wild, for he was admitted a little reluctantly and directed indifferently. He went up a back stair, threaded his way through dusty museums, stunned at last by the stench of an elephant being dissected, he knew he had arrived. There was not a sound in the laboratory, but a dozen people were working like beavers despite the heat and the loathsome reek.

and

Years afterward Tilney said, "The silence was as strange as everything else in the room. It seemed mysteriously dynamic and intensively concentrated. It was not the silence of dead and inanimate things, but an almost breathless interest, vivid and vital, seeking and finding revelation in the forms of organic matter. Charging the silence with his compelling personality sat Huntington at his customary table in the dingy light of the old north window."

Huntington was dressed in brown overalls, but his clothes took on the dignity of his greatness and became appropriate to the courtesy of the man. The atmosphere of the fusty little office to which he led Tilney, might have been that of the scientist's home or club. Informal and friendly, he listened with rare understanding. Now at last Tilney felt certain he had found the great

teacher he sought, and the pent up hunger of his thwarted years cried out again for satisfaction. But in the end he received little. Huntington's attitude was one of laissez-faire, for the truth he served was not to be appeased by mere yearning and worship, but by competent work.

"Find out what you can," he said, "you're welcome here."

Tilney said he wanted to study the brain, for he has always believed it to be the master-key of evolution.

"Is there any cognate subject you want to study?"

"No, I just want to study the brain," Tilney insisted, feeling that somehow he was being put off his main objective.

And the upshot was that he was sent off again and spent an exceedingly unsatisfactory year with a guinea-pig's brain, under another professor. At the end of this he went back to Huntington and begged to work with him on any cognate subject he cared to name, if only he might do it under the great morphologist and evolutionist himself.

Huntington, convinced of his determination, set the acolyte down at a table, gave him a microscope, tools and some embryos, and told him to work on the genito-urinary system of the cat. And there Tilney worked for two years without touching the brain.

For weeks the master offered no comment on Tilney's work. Their desks were side by side, but "Good morning," and "Good evening," made up the sum of the long coveted criticism. And Tilney didn't have the nerve, he says, to ask questions. But at last when he had shown his ability to strike out alone, they

talked together of his work. And near the completion of two years' investigation he said to himself, "Now he'll let me work on the brain."

Tilney reckoned without fate. All his work for Rachel was rewarded with a Leah. For Huntington had just received six embryos of a little goat-like animal which retains reptilian characters and thus achieves a leading actor's importance in the drama of evolution. Tilney was asked to work out their lymphatics. The evolutionist believed that blood would tell their kinship to both mammalian and reptilian orders and he chose this earnest young man who could keep his nose to the grindstone and his eyes on the stars, to reveal it. There were two years more of work on four of the embryos. Then Huntington asked his student to write a short paper setting forth his findings, the paper to be read before an academic gathering at Ithaca.

Now it happened that Tilney was entirely innocent of a controversy then raging between Johns Hopkins and Harvard on the one side, and Princeton and Columbia on the other, on the very subject upon which he had been working. He simply had done the work Huntington assigned him and held no brief for any interpretation, but his paper nevertheless sustained the Columbia position and so answered Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Harvard. He was dumbfounded at the applause and laughter which followed his reading.

Huntington sought him out. "When you go back," he said, “you may study the brain."

"You see," Tilney explains, "he