THOMAS KAYNESFOKD LOUNSBUKV. S'jij 



months after his death, it was printed under the supervision of his 

 junior colleague and devoted friend, Professor Wilbur Cross. 



In 1871, Professor Lounsbury married Jane, daughter of General 

 Thomas J. Fohvell, of Xew York. With one son, she survived him. 



II 



It is happily characteristic of Professor Lounsbury that when he 

 retired from the drudgery of teaching, in 1906, a neighbor more than 

 twenty years younger than he sent the Yale Alumni Weekly a cohunn 

 touching on the humanity of him just as a neighbor. There have 

 rarelv been men more stoutlv themselves; but vou could hardlv meet 

 him, even occasionally and casually, without a contagious sense of 

 human fellowship. As one thinks of him now, the first thought is 

 that he was of the few who can unwittingly help fellow beings to be 

 better fellows. His appearance was by no means academic; rather 

 his burly vigor bespoke the old soldier. So late as 1915, when he was 

 more than seventy-five years old, he allowed to stand in Who's Who 

 the statement that his favorite recreations were cycling and tennis. 

 A tall man and a large, sandy-haired and bearded, with heavy-lidded 

 eyes which troubled him in his later years, he might have looked ponder- 

 ous, if he had been less alert. He was voluble yet affable; whether 

 vou talked back to him or not, vou felt as if vou did. His boundless 

 range of information was always at his command. He had the buoyant 

 potency of a great scholar; he could master books and they could not 

 master him. No man was ever more free from the insidious bonds of 

 pedantry. Life is real, books are the record of past realities; to under- 

 stand books we must take them for what they truly are — the data 

 from w^hich imagination can revive aspects of life no longer visible to 

 living men. Your pedant stops at the letter, imprisoned in the walls 

 of his hbrary; your scholar finds his library an open gate to worlds 

 he can never explore too eagerly. He loves his path, no doubt, but 

 mostly because it is the w^ay to boundless journeys of discovery ; and 

 discovery is discovery, be it of a new flower or of a new continent or 

 planet. We may seem to be straying from a life which passed half its 

 allotted span in the teaching of boys at an American Scientific School; 

 yet those who remember Professor Lounsbury can hardly help, from 

 the very force of his memory, starting away from daily commonplace. 



How tremendously commonplace the circumstances of his profes- 

 sional work must have been, anyone who has taught undergraduates 



