CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 405 



carried out. For comparatively few countries are there available such 

 excellent meteorological and climatological publications, some of them 

 in English, as the Argentine Meteorological Service has sent out. 



By the death of Walter Gould Davis the world lost one of its most 

 eminent meteorologists, and those of his colleagues who had the privi- 

 lege of knowing him lost a warm-hearted, sympathetic and helpful 

 friend. 



Robert DeC. Ward. 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON (1827-1908) 



Fellow in Class III, Section 4, 1860 



The two volumes of "Letters of Charles Eliot Norton," published, 

 "with biographical comment," in 1913, have rendered so accessible 

 the record of the life and work of this Fellow of the Academy that it 

 would be superfluous to supplement it here with an extensive memoir. 



He was born, November 16, 1827, at Shady Hill, Cambridge, the 

 house of his father Professor Andrews Norton, (1787-1853), also a 

 Fellow of the Academy. In this house, the home of his lifetime, he 

 died, October 21, 1908. The distinction of beginning and ending one's 

 days under the same roof is not one to which many Americans can lay 

 claim ; yet Charles Eliot Norton was by descent from a long and dis- 

 tinguished New England ancestry an American of Americans. He was 

 exceptional among his contemporaries, however, for a background of 

 cosmopolitan experience in friendships and intellectual pursuits which 

 made him, more than most New Englanders, a citizen of the world. 



Graduating at Harvard College with the Class of 1846, he began his 

 active life in the counting-house of a Boston firm of East India mer- 

 chants. This afl^orded him the opportunity to sail for the Far East as 

 supercargo of a ship in 1849. Before his return to Boston in 1851 he 

 had seen much of India and its people, and, returning by way of 

 Europe, had made many stimulating acquaintances in Paris and 

 London, and one friendship — with George William Curtis — ■ which 

 played an important part in all his later life. In the years that 

 immediately followed he began his career as a man of letters, publish- 

 ing in 1853 his first and second books, "Five Christmas Hymns," of 



