Benefactor of Science

Oldest anatomical research institute in the U. S., the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology is housed in a yellow brick, old-fashioned but scrupulously clean building in West Philadelphia. From the rumbling presses in its basement pours a stream of weighty periodicals: Journal of Morphology, Journal of Comparative Neurology, Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology, Journal of Nutrition, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, five others. These make dismal and mostly incomprehensible reading for laymen, but publication is the lifeblood of science and the specialists who read the Wistar publications understand and appreciate them.

Numerous are Wistar Institute's other activities:

It has a famed colony of white rats from which it dispenses specimens of that valuable research animal to scientists in need of them.

Its zoologist, Helen Dean King, who has been conducting rat breeding experiments since 1909, has every mutation of white or wild gray rat except a yellow rat with dark red eyes, which she expects to obtain this week.

It has a frog farm and an opossum farm on which the birth of young opossums, less than a half-inch long, is about to be recorded in motion pictures.

Its anatomist, Edmond J. Farris, has developed such a remarkable chemical technique for preserving specimens that he is confident he could preserve indefinitely the body of any notable human being, at a cost of $20,000. (He deprecates the preservation of Enrico Caruso and Nikolai Lenin as "mere embalmings," suspects that the body of Caruso is secretly re-embalmed every year, says "Lenin is turning dark. He won't last.")

All in all the Wistar Institute is an invaluable asset to U. S. biology. And last week there occurred something which the Institute considered the most noteworthy event in its history since Soapmaker Samuel Fels gave $50,000 to its rat colony. The nourishing estate of the Institute is mainly due to its founder, Isaac Jones Wistar, a hard-bitten adventurer in his youth, a brigadier-general in the Civil War, a forthright and crusty capitalist in his old age. One of the general's great uncles, famed Anatomist Caspar Wistar* of the University of Pennsylvania, had left an anatomical collection. This was the nucleus of the Wistar Institute and Isaac wanted to see it properly housed. When he died in 1905 he had given the Institute $1,000,000, as well as his brain, his crippled right forearm and hand, including the fingernails ("a desirable specimen of gunshot ankylosis"), his bloody Civil War sword which he preferred never to have cleaned, and several other relics including his baby caps and snuffboxes.

Oldest of ten children, Isaac was born in Philadelphia in 1827, went to a Quaker school and Haverford College, was apprenticed to a dry-goods merchant, later to a mapmaker. Finding his "worldly spirit" in collision with the piety of his father, he struck out on his own, worked as a farmhand, then started west with a companion, bumming rides on primitive trains, stealing poultry, taking up with a drunken canal boatman.

When he heard of gold on the Pacific Coast he started for California as a matter of course, arriving with a wagon train after combating cholera, dysentery, Indians, grizzly bears, treacherous rivers, hunger, thirst. He panned a few ounces of gold but gave it up to become a sailor, trapper, steamboat ticket speculator. In San Francisco he studied law, became a prominent citizen, headed the forces opposed to the Vigilantes, met and disliked William Tecumseh ("War is Hell'') Sherman who was then simply a California banker and commander of the California militia. In the Civil War, Wistar was wounded four times, saw noteworthy action at Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg and elsewhere, was once deprived of his command because, he said, of the enmity of General Benjamin Butler.

All this the old soldier recounted, in pompous language but frank detail, in memoirs which he wrote for his kinsmen only. He was aware that he had led a remarkable life, believed that he had lived in a remarkable age. After his right hand was crippled at Ball's Bluff, he learned to write with his left. But his left arm was paralyzed at Antietam, so when he sat down to tell the story of his life he shifted back to the crippled right.

In 1914 the Wistar Institute printed a 250-volume edition of the memoirs, which was privately circulated. Last week, the great event in the Institute's life was the publication, with the consent of living members of the family, of a 2,500-volume limited edition (518 pages, $5), of The Autobiography of Isaac Jones Wistar.

A strange adventure tale interlarded with the vigorous opinions of a man who knew his own mind better than most, it relates many striking incidents. Some of the more noteworthy:

P: In Panama, he saw a "dare-devil," acting on a wager, light his cigar from a candle on the high altar of the Cathedral Church of San Juan de Dios, while 50 priests were conducting mass before 3,000 communicants. The sacrilege precipitated riots in which many persons were killed.

P: During the war. a woman made application to pass through his lines into the Confederacy, with her family, household effects and a Negro child. The application reached General Wistar marked "Approved except as respects the Negro child." Wistar wrote on it ''approved, including the Negro, since such a child if left behind and separated from its natural protectors, would require dry nursing, for which I possess no soldiers properly fitted."

P: When he was managing a canal company, Wistar called on President Ulysses S. Grant at Long Beach, N. J. to protest against what he considered oppressive tax maneuvers engaged in by the Secretary of the Treasury. During the conversation Grant asked: "General Wistar, have you any friends in Philadelphia who would buy that cottage across the road? I am very anxious to dispose of it." Wistar, suspecting that he was being felt out for a bribe, departed indignantly.

*After whom the vine, Wistaria, is named.

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