278 Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 



one are such that I fear I must not mention the name of a very 

 well known speaker who was invited to address the society during 

 the early nineties, but whose remarks were disappointing in that 

 he started off with a profound introduction and then proceeded 

 to elaborate his thesis in a manner which was characteristic of 

 the man and which by no means upheld his well-founded scien- 

 tific reputation. The meeting adjourned, and as I passed out 

 of the room, Dr. Theobald Smith, touching shoulders with me, 

 said, "Did that talk remind you of one of the Chinese puzzle 

 boxes?" "No, why?" I said. "Why you must know those 

 trick boxes where you work for a while and finally open it, and 

 then find another box inside, and you work for a while and open 

 that and find another, and you keep on opening boxes until down 

 in the middle there is a very small insignificant box." Of course 

 I was delighted with this, and going into the adjoining room in 

 the Cosmos Club found Dr. G. Brown Goode sitting there sipping 

 from a tall glass. I told him this incident with great joy, and 

 had no sooner completed it than I was horrified because it sud- 

 denly occurred to me that the speaker of the evening was a 

 former teacher of Goode. However, I need not have worried, 

 because he smiled his genial smile and said, "I peeked into the 

 room and saw that Blank was getting confidential with his audi- 

 ence, and so came in here and ordered a bottle of beer." 



All of these incidents occurred at least nearly 30 years ago. 

 Many strange things, however, have come up in our meetings 

 in more recent times, as for example : 



Extract from Proceedings of The Biological Society of Washington Janu- 

 ary 20, 1906: 



Dr. Albert Mann related a case of the capture and raising from the floor 

 of a snake by a spider in Pennington (N. J.) Seminary. 



Dr. Mann apparently did not explain what the snake was 

 doing in the seminary! Dr. Mann is always entertaining and 

 scientifically veracious when he talks of Diatoms, and in this 

 story he was surely entertaining. 



But enough of these stories. Since those very early days the 

 Biological Society has swollen and cracked and given out satil- 

 lites, just as did the old Philosophical Society. The entomologists 

 broke away first, then the botanists, and now the Aquarium 

 Society has been founded, and the Naturalists Field Club has 



