270 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



with the late Captain Phillips to Newfoundland and Davis 

 Straits, and again to East Greenland with that well-known 

 navigator Captain James Robertson, afterwards of the 

 " Scotia " : on each of these voyages he found opportunities 

 for dredging, and returned with a very large collection of 

 Arctic invertebrates. And again he came with me on one 

 of my journeys to the North Pacific, to the Pribyloff and 

 Commander Islands, and to Kamtchatka, photographing and 

 collecting all the while. 



About the year 1895, when the Perth Museum was 

 reorganised and its new buildings erected, he was appointed 

 its first Curator. The Perth Museum is by a long way the 

 finest local collection of natural history in Scotland, and 

 though there are many greater collections of the kind else- 

 where, I know not one that is more choice and elegant and 

 educative. Many men, living and dead, have helped to 

 make it. Colonel Drummond Hay helped so much that 

 his name cannot be left unsaid. But nevertheless, as the 

 Museum stands to-day, to my thinking it is Aleck Rodger's 

 monument. He lavished patient care on every nook and 

 corner of it. The work he did was not for outward show, 

 but, as it were, " for the gods to see." When, after months 

 of labour on some case of specimens, he at last considered 

 his work done, it was a thing perfect of its kind. 



So Aleck Rodger's quiet and modest life passed by, in 



diligent work, in the study and love of Nature, in home-life 



of unusual happiness, and, not least, in faithful service to his 



Church. But across all the years of friendship between 



him and me, it has seemed to me that his capacity for 



friendship was his greatest quality. He had the very genius 



of friendship, and the golden gift of easy, kindly intercourse 



with all sorts and conditions of men. Among the rough 



deckhands on board a Greenland whaler, as a guest of the 



ward-room on board the old Ampliion or the Rainbow in the 



Pacific, among the lairds of Perthshire and the townspeople 



of Perth, among the children whom he drew around him in 



his Museum, it was always the same simple story of mutual 



confidence and easy, unostentatious popularity. 



D. W. T. 



\%th Nov. 19 1 4. 



