The Days of a Man 



edge of both Spanish and Italian, and whose friendly 

 interest was quite helpful to me. 



Albert N. Prentiss, professor of Botany, my im- 

 mediate superior, was also a very kind friend. In 

 my junior year (1871), at his request I was made 

 instructor in the department, a piece of good fortune 

 which enabled me thenceforward to pay all my 

 college expenses without recourse to less congenial 

 work. The fact that I was still an undergraduate 

 and only twenty years old caused the appointment 

 to be criticized by the college journal at Yale. But 

 I was no novice in dealing with the plants of the 

 region; indeed, to speak frankly, I knew the Eastern 

 flora better than most professors of Botany. In my 

 classes were a number of men since distinguished in 

 natural science, Dudley, Branner, Comstock, 

 Kellerman, Lazenby, Fairchild, and Henderson, 

 besides others, Anderson among them, whose closest 

 interests lay along different lines. 



Botany I had made my major subject, with 

 Geology and Zoology as what would now be called 

 General "minors." But I also elected all the History courses 

 as well as all those in French, German, Spanish, and 

 Italian, besides a brief course in Chinese. Knowledge 

 of modern languages has always seemed to me 

 necessary to any just view of the modern world; to 

 my original acquisition, I ten years later added 

 Norwegian, which I think one of the most interesting 

 of all, as the close-shackled German is the least so. 

 Mathematics I followed through the required courses 

 only, having no taste for abstract speculation, of 

 which the higher derivatives of Algebra are the 

 quintessence. In Inorganic Chemistry I took and 

 enjoyed all that was offered, so that Schaeffer 



courses 



