A Memorial Tribute to William L. Brown

I knew him for 50 years, and I've never met anyone else remotely like him. Bill Brown was unique, and I don't think we'll ever see his like again, not just for the rareness of his character, but for the uniqueness of the time in which he lived and worked on his beloved ants. I've thought a lot about what made Bill different, what caused him to bum with such a pure inner light, and I've come up with this: the devotion to his art. His art. He was a scientist to the bone, a hard-core factual investigator, relentless for more information, skeptical in mood, all those things and yet . . . myrmecology, the study of ants, was an art form to him. It was the center of his creative life, and he was a very creative man. The passion he radiated about this subject turned younger people (we all seemed younger than Uncle Bill) into acolytes, into apprentices; and there was no prize the academic world could offer us more than a rare, measured compliment from the master, something like "Yeah, that's pretty good; that's really interesting." I first met Bill through correspondence in 1947, when I was 18, and already taken my vows, so to speak, in ant taxonomy, just as he had been in contact with his mentor, William S. (Bill) Creighton, since he was 16. In natural history, addiction occurs early. In the summer of 1950, I rode a Greyhound bus all the way from Mobile, Alabama, to Boston, and stayed with Bill and Doris in their little apartment near Harvard, as they prepared to leave for Australia and momentous field research in that still myrmecologically underexplored continent. We worked in the MCZ ant collection together, and he gave me the kind of plain, sincere egalitarian treatment he was to bestow on dozens of other students in his field in the decades to follow. He welcomed you, he treated you with respect, he stood in awe with you before the intricacy