Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

The next year, when he had succeeded Professor Baird as head of the Institution, he at once inaugurated a change in the character of its publications. “If the Smithsonian is to live up to the ideal of its founder ‘in increasing knowledge among men,’ the written accounts of its work must be plain and interesting enough to appeal to people of ordinary education and intelligence,” he said.

It was largely due to his efforts that the National Zoölogical Park was created. “We must have not only live books but live specimens,” he said. “The stuffed and mounted creatures are well enough in their way, but they have monopolized too much attention.”

For a while there was a small zoo housed in cages and kennels almost under the eaves of the Smithsonian offices, until sufficient interest could be aroused in Congress to secure a tract of land along Rock Creek for a national park. Here at last Professor Langley realized his dream of a pleasure-ground for the people, where there might be preserved in places like their natural haunts—on hillsides, in rocky caves, or along streams—specimens of the animal life of the world, which is in a large measure disappearing before the advance of man.

Remembering how his interest in scientific problems had begun in his childhood when he had stopped to wonder about the things that attracted his attention, Professor Langley fitted up a place in the Smithsonian especially for children. Opposite the front door, in a room bright with sunshine, singing birds, and aquariums of darting gold-fish, he put the sort of things that all boys and girls would like to see. There you may see the largest and smallest birds in the world, the largest and smallest eggs, and specimens of the birds that all children meet in their story-books, such as the raven, rook, magpie, skylark, starling, and nightingale. There, too, are all sorts of curious nests; eggs of water birds that look like pebbles; insects that exactly mimic twigs or leaves, and so can hide in the most wonderful way; beautiful butterflies and humming-birds; and shells, coral, and all kinds of curious creatures from the bottom of the sea.

It is said that once a lady who sat next Professor Langley at a dinner-party and found him apparently uninterested in all her attempts at conversation, suddenly asked, “Is there anything at all, Mr. Wiseman, which you really care to talk about?”

The professor roused himself from his fit of abstraction with a start. Then he smiled and said, “Yes, two things—children and fairy-tales.”

It was the lady’s turn to look surprised and smile.

“Now I understand how you were able to make that Children’s Room so exactly what it should be,” she said. “Only some one who understood wonder and loved the wonderful could have done it!”

While Professor Langley was working in this way to make the institution of which he was head a greater power for teaching and inspiration in the lives of the people, he was not relaxing any of his own efforts as a scientific investigator. An astrophysical observatory was founded and there he went on with his special studies and experiments in regard to the properties of sunlight. When people wanted to know the practical value of his minute observations he used to say:

“All truth works for man if you give it time; the application is never far to seek. The expert knowledge of to-day becomes the inventor’s tool to-morrow.”