nder the banquet
lights.

Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments
were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways. He was a
trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the
most various branches of natural science. At another class dinner,
when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany
came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the
roof of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy the trees of Cambridge, the
masses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special
beauty. I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of
Charles, before the British Association, emphasising the idea that
the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree.
Plants may have memory, perhaps show passion, predatory instincts, or
rudimentary intelligence. The plant-world is therefore part and parcel
of animated nature. Agassiz announced with real fervour his adherence
to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support. Subtle
links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to
investigation. In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever
starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the
outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of
development. There was a brotherhood between man and not only the
zooephyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which
organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from
the azoic rock on which it hangs.

As he talked I thought of the ample spaces of his Museum where the
whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man,
then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and
plants counterfeited in glass continuing the line unbroken, down to
the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it
clings.

My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science,
and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch. In
the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down
to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my classmate in a remote
part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss
friends. I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming
from his place he sought me out. "I heard your voice," he said, "and
knew you were here before I saw you." We chatted genially. That
day