ABSTRACT
By the early 1900s Henry Fairfield Osborn felt he had come very close to proving his general theory of evolution, though few other scientists concurred. They were moving off in other directions, led by the new biology, genetics and neo-Darwinism. He saw that the new biology with its distaste for morphology and fossils and its reliance upon laboratory techniques and the study of heredity at the cellular level, was proving a more insightful way of approaching the subject and was proving his theories obsolete. He knew he was being abandoned by the scientific mainstream, even by some of his closest allies. His assistant, William Diller Matthew, being more of a traditional Darwinist who was not interested in internal perfecting mechanisms, was drifting away. Osborn lamented to Wick Scott: 'I find my conclusions so different from those of Dr Matthew, for example, that ... all of his conceptions are quite different from mine. ' I The new ways, with their loss of certainty and abandonment of old authorities, frightened him, while the old ways still comforted him. In the end he danced around the scary parts, leaving them to younger more fearless researchers, and stuck with what eased his mind and soothed his soul.
