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instruction on proper etiquette. Mary Scott Skinker’s stylish wardrobe, which usually included a rose pinned at her left shoulder, was always closely watched at dinner. For a time rumors of a serious suitor circulated, as boxes of flowers arrived for Miss Skinker every few days, though eventually these stopped coming. Skinker later told one of her former students that she had given up on the idea of getting married while she was at PCW.
    A dynamic and demanding teacher, Skinker was not averse to handing out a low grade when it was deserved. People were curious as to whether even a clever, hardworking girl like Rachel Carson could get an A in her class. What nobody anticipated was that Carson would be transformed by biology and by Miss Skinker. Not only did she earn A’s, Carson began to think about changing her major to biology. She mulled this decision carefully, and for a time would contemplate only adding biology as a minor.As a junior, she found herself happily spending more and more time in the cramped little laboratory on the top floor of Dilworth Hall, which always smelled of formaldehyde. Sometimes Carson and her lab partner would go back after dinner to dissect specimens in the wan light given off by the tungsten-filament bulbs that hung on wires from the ceiling and swayed when the winter wind was up.
    The field of biology was then in a primitive state relative to what it would become during Carson’s lifetime. DNA wouldn’t be fully described for another three decades and little was known about the molecular basis of life. A living cell was described as a membrane containing “protoplasm,” a fluid, unstable jumble of varied substances and structures believed by some biologists to be composed of filaments or fibers, while others thought it was more like a mass of bubbles.All living things were known to be made of cells, and processes within cells were understood to regulate metabolism and heredity. Biologists were keenly interested in chromosomes, distinct structures within cells whose precise separations during cell division were visible in a light microscope. It had been proposed that specific segments of chromosomes called “genes” were involved in heredity. But how this worked remained a mystery.
    Biology in the 1920s encompassed tangential subjects—including hygiene, food safety, agronomy, public health, nutrition, and sanitation—that reflected an intersection between science and home economics, a prominent feature in the education of women. Standard biology texts also explored the concept of eugenics, a frankly racist and xenophobic field that proposed to improve the human species by means of selective reproduction. The idea was that “race improvement” could be achieved by encouraging persons with superior physical, mental, and moral attributes to marry and mate—while discouraging inferior people from breeding. One popular textbook suggested that eugenics should be the official policy of the state and that anyone wanting a marriage license should have to pass a physical examination first. Immigrants, the book advised, should be rigorously screened to exclude those with undesirable characteristics, and it would be prudent for “feeble minded” persons to be confined to government-run work camps.
    Much in vogue after the turn of the century, eugenics flourished—as an idea if not as a policy—until Nazi Germany extended the concept to its logical conclusion in the Holocaust.
    Evolution figured prominently in biology instruction in the 1920s, although some high school programs downplayed or excised Darwin’s theory following the 1925 conviction of a schoolteacher named John Scopes in the so-called Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where it was illegal to teach evolution. For Skinker and her students, evolution was settled science. The earth was then estimated to be about three billion years old—it’s closer to four and a half billion—and all living forms were believed to have descended from