Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

“This first prize, by unanimous vote of the committee”, he roared, “goes to Pegoud”. I folded my wings around my body, bowed, and was handed a white box, which when opened disclosed a full set of garnet sleeve links, studs, collar buttons, etc. Gertrude overheard in a group next morning, “Really, my dear Lady Mary, I don’t see why they gave the prize to Pegoud, because after all it wasn’t Pegoud at all, and besides it wasn’t a pretty costume”.

* * *

Wood never brags of his great scientific achievements, but is vain as a child concerning triumphs of that sort.

He returned, with his family, to Paris, finished up his research, and sailed for home in June, 1914.

Chapter Twelve.

Wood as a Poet and Author — or the Splendors and Miseries of a Scientist Who Strayed into Popular Literary Fields

One day Wood met Oliver Herford in the Players Club, and Herford said, grinning, “Come along and have lunch and I’ll promise not to autograph any more of your funny books”.

Wood had turned aside from science, as Lewis Carroll did, to perpetuate “a revised manual of flornithology for beginners”, entitled How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers. It had got off to a bad start in 1907 — then suddenly was all over the place — and a lot of people later attributed it to Herford, saying that only Herford could have written it. Dr. Wood had written it for his own amusement, to spoof the public and as a book to end all books on botany written for children by the mushy male and female nature-fakers of the period. It was done with jingles, woodcuts of his own drawings, and appalling puns. It began by explaining how to tell the difference between the crow and the crocus, the catbird and the catnip, the clover and the plover, the quail and the kale, the roc and the shamrock — then invaded the piscatorial and animal kingdoms to treat of the ape and the grape, the pansy and chimpanzee, the puss and octo-pus, the cow and the cowry.

It had appeared under the imprint of Paul Elder & Co., and Elder hadn’t succeeded in making it go. “None of the bookshops would stock it when approached by Elder’s salesmen (if he had any)”, says Wood. “Boston’s largest bookshop reluctantly took six copies, on consignment. A few weeks later they ordered five hundred”. It was super-nonsense and had begun to catch on by word of mouth. Then the Sunday supplements began splurging its cuckoo drawings — and all of a sudden it was going like wildfire.

Wood sent President Theodore Roosevelt an autographed copy of Birds and Flowers at a time when he was being violently attacked as a “nature-faker” by a certain Reverend Long. Wood wrote on his flyleaf, “I am venturing to send you a remark-proof copy of my current Nature book, which I trust will fill a Long-felt want”. Roosevelt sent a cordial acknowledgment, and asked to see more of Wood’s writings. So Wood sent him a copy of Physical Optics!

And who, wondered children and grownups, was this Robert Williams Wood? If they’d ever heard of a famous professor of physics by that name — which most of them hadn’t — it didn’t occur to them to connect the names…

Wood is no shrinking violet, and one night the story that Herford had written it got in his hair. It was at a dinner party in Washington. Someone chanced to quote from the book, and the man sitting opposite said, “Oh, yes, that’s from the Birds and Flowers thing by Herford”.

Wood said, “I beg your pardon, but Herford didn’t write it”.

“Well, I happen to know he did”, said the man a bit truculently. “You see, Oliver Herford happens to be a friend of mine”.

“I can’t help that”, insisted Wood, “but I tell you he didn’t write it”.

“What makes you so sure he didn’t?”

“Because I wrote it myself!” Wood exploded. “And then”, says Wood, recalling the episode, “he knew I was lying”.

How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers is now in its nineteenth edition and still going strong.

Reproduced from How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers by Robert Williams Wood with permission of the publishers, Dodd, Mead and Company.