Breakfast Table several times afterwards, and once called at his house and had a two hours' private conversation. He was very interesting from his constant flow of easy conversation; but when we were alone he turned our talk on Spiritualism, in which he was much interested and which he was evidently inclined to accept, though he had little personal knowledge of the phenomena.

The National Academy of Science was now sitting at Boston, and I attended several of its meetings, at one of which I heard Professor Langley explain his wonderful discovery of the extension of the heat-spectrome by means of his new instrument, the bolometer. At another meeting

Professor Cope read a paper, while Professor Marsh was in the chair, evidently to his great annoyance, as the relations of these great palæontologists were much as were those of Owen and Huxley after 1860. At another meeting the question of geographical distribution came up, and Professor Asa Gray called on me to say something. I was rather taken aback, and could think of nothing else but the phenomena of seed dispersal by the wind, as shown by the varying proportion of endemic species in oceanic islands, and by the total absence in the Azores of all those genera whose seeds could not be air-borne (either by winds or birds), thus throwing light upon some of the most curious facts in plant-distribution. I think the subject, as I put it, was new to most of the naturalists present.

I went several times to Cambridge in order to examine carefully the two important museums there-the Agassiz Museum of Zoology and the Peabody Museum of Archæology. Both are admirable, and Mr. Alexander Agassiz kindly showed me over every part of the former museum, an account of which I have given in the second volume of my Studies, Scientific and Social."

One day I spent at Salem on a visit to Professor Edward Morse and his pleasant family. He had lived several years in Japan, and had made a very extensive collection of Japanese pottery, ancient and modern. He has about four thousand specimens, all distinct, many of great rarity and

value. I also dined with Professor Asa Gray to meet most of the biological professors of Harvard University. After dinner he asked me to give them some account of how I was led to the theory of natural selection, and this was followed by some interesting conversation.

One evening I was invited to a meeting of the New England Women's Club, where the Rev. J. G. Brooks gave an address on "What Socialists want." I could hardly make out whether he was a socialist or not, but I thought his views to be very vague and unpractical. I was not at that time a thorough socialist, but considered that a true "social economy" founded on land nationalization and equality of opportunity was what was immediately required. When called upon, I spoke in this sense for about half an hour. I afterwards wrote it out, treating it more systematically, and read it to a private meeting of my friends at Washington. Its substance is embodied in the chapter on "Economic and Social Justice" in my "Studies."

After my earlier Lowell lectures were over, I was free to give them elsewhere, and had a few very interesting engagements. On November 19 I went to Williamstown, in the extreme north-west corner of Massachusetts, to lecture at Williams College on "Colours of Animals." The lecture was appreciated, but, unfortunately, the lantern was so poor as not to show the coloured slides to advantage. Williamstown is in a fine mountainous country, and the next day one of the professors drove me in a buggy over very rough roads, and sometimes over snow, to a pretty waterfall, where I collected a few of the characteristic American ferns, which I sent home, and which lived for many years in my garden. I here first noticed the very striking effect of the white-barked birches and yellow-barked willows in the winter landscape. The fine Cypripedium spectabile, I was told, grew abundantly in the bogs of this district. I was hospitably entertained by President Carter, who invited me to visit him in the summer, when there are abundance of pretty flowers-an invitation, I much regret, I was unable to profit by.

Between my two last lectures in Boston I had to give one

at Meriden, a small manufacturing town in Connecticut, involving a railway journey of nearly two hundred miles each way. I stayed with Mr. Robert Bowman, an Englishman and a manufacturer of plated goods, who had been thirty years in America. Much of the country I passed through, as well as that round Meriden itself, was picturesque with rock and mountain and rapid streams, yet the whole effect was, as I noted in my journal, "scraggy as usual," while an American writer declares that the whole country "has been reduced to a state of unkempt and sordid ugliness." But I am pretty sure that the more naturally picturesque parts of this New England country must be very beautiful in spring and early summer, when the abundant vegetation would conceal and beautify that which is bare and ugly in winter. The climate, too, is unfavourable to that amount of verdure which we can show throughout the year; while the universality of old irregular hedgerows in our lowland districts gives a finish and a charm to our scenery which is wholly wanting where straight lines of split-wood fences are almost equally universal.

My next lecture was at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, on the way to which I had agreed to pay a visit to Professor Marsh, at Newhaven, where I arrived on the evening of November 26. My host, who was a bachelor and very wealthy, had built himself an eccentric kind of house, the main feature of which was a large octagonal hall, full of trophies collected during his numerous explorations in the far West, and used as a reception and dining-room, with pretty suites of visitors' rooms opening out of it—a roomy kind of solidly built bungalow. It is situated near the Peabody Museum of Yale College, where there was at that time the largest collection of fossil skeletons, chiefly of mammals and reptiles of America, to be seen anywhere. The next morning was devoted to seeing these wonderful remains of an extinct world, among which were the huge bones of the atlantosaurus, a reptile near a hundred feet long and thirty feet high, supposed to be the largest land animal that has ever existed. The remarkable horned dinosauria, the flying

pterodactyles of strange forms, as well as the almost complete series of links connecting the modern horse with the very ancient eohippus and hyracotherium, were very interesting. These latter were very small animals with four toes, which were succeeded by larger and larger forms with fewer toes, till they culminated in the modern horses, asses, and zebras, with a single toe, or hoof, on each foot.

In the evening I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Dana, the first of American geologists, and one or two other professors of Yale. The next morning was spent in a stroll over the parks and gardens, and in admiring the grand elm trees which line many of the streets of this picturesque city and render it one of the most pleasing I visited in America. In the afternoon I went by train to New York, and then on to Poughkeepsie and to Vassar College, one of the most extensive and complete ladies' colleges, where half the professors are ladies, while the president was Dr. J. M. Taylor.

I breakfasted in the hall with the lady principal, doctor, professors, and students, of whom there are about three hundred. Each student has a separate bedroom, and to each three bedrooms there is a sitting-room, and so far as possible they are allowed to group themselves. Students enter at sixteen by a rather stiff examination in mathematics, Latin, either Greek, German, or French, history, etc. The regular course of study includes natural history, physiology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy, all taught experimentally in laboratories, and an observatory which has a meridian circle and a twelve-inch equatorial. There is also a good natural history museum and art gallery. AngloSaxon and moral philosophy are taught in the last term. The grounds are over two hundred acres of rather rough park-like country, containing a lake with boats and a gymnasium. In the evening I lectured on "Oceanic Islands" to a good and very attentive audience.

The next morning I had to be up at 5 a.m. in order to catch the train to New York and on to Baltimore, where I lectured in the evening on "Darwinism." I gave here four lectures to the Peabody Institute, and one, on "Island Life,"

VOL. II.

I

at the Johns Hopkins University. The next morning I called on President Gilman, who showed me round the buildings, library, reading-room, etc., and introduced me to the professors, among whom was Dr. W. K. Brooks, the zoologist, who asked me to lunch with him, and afterwards took me to walk over the Druid Hill Park, a finely wooded hilly tract of 680 acres, close to the town, and forming one of the most picturesque recreation grounds I have seen. I also spent

an evening with Professor Brooks, when we talked on Darwinian topics mainly. One day I dined with President Gilman, and met afterwards a host of professors, students, and ladies, and had a very pleasant evening. Another day I called on Professor Ely and had a long talk on the political and social outlook. In the evening he took me to a meeting of psychologists-professors and students-whose talk was so technical as to be almost unintelligible to me, and when they asked my opinion on some of their unsettled problems, I was obliged to say that I had paid no attention to them, and that I was only interested in the question of how far the intellectual and moral nature of man could have been developed from those of the lower animals through the agency of natural selection, or whether they indicated some distinct origin and some higher law; and I gave them a sketch of my views as afterwards developed in the last eighteen pages of my "Darwinism."

After my last lecture (on December 9) I went to President Gilman's, where I met, among others, Professor Langley, the physicist. The talk was chiefly about Professor Sylvester, who had excited immense interest, not only by his wonderfully original mathematical genius, but also by his eccentricities and self-absorption. Many anecdotes were told of him. He had started to dine with a professor who lived not five minutes' walk from his own house, and whom he had repeatedly visited; yet he wandered about the streets searching for it in vain, and came in a full hour late. After having lived several years in Baltimore, he was one day asked in the street to direct a person to one of the bestknown public buildings, and hastily replied, "Pray excuse me; I am quite a stranger here." His genius for solving