76 Daniel and Mary Merriman 



travels have carried him to Sun Valley and Florida. In 1955 the production of syn- 

 thetic diamonds has been achieved, finally bearing out the statement in 1879 by 

 Nevil Story Maskelyne of the Mineral Department of the British Museum, "... 

 that (this problem) will be solved, no scientific mind can doubt ". In Boston on 

 December 3, 1879, the Atlantic Monthly gave a party for the seventieth birthday of 

 the " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table " ; today it would be hard to rival the distinction 

 of the gathering which included beside O. W. Holmes these others : H. B. Stowe, 

 J. G. Whittier, H. W. Longfellow, R. W. Emerson, Mark Twain, W. D. How^lls, 

 and J. W. Howe. The February 11th issue of the 1879 London Times carried the 

 statement that, " Arrangements are being settled with the Societe Generale d'Elec- 

 tricite for an experimental lighting of the reading-room of the Museum with the 

 electric light ". And the April 10th issue reported that communication by telephone 

 was established between the Royal Institution and Burlington House, "... with 

 Professor Tyndall at one extremity of the wire and Professor Huxley at the other "; 

 there was apparently much amusement among those present, and, " The feasibility 

 of telephonic communication was clearly demonstrated, the voice being distinctly 

 audible over the whole of a large room ". 



The London Times for 1 879 also contains numerous articles on science and natural 

 history and makes reference to many familiar names. Thus Frank Buckland* and 

 Spencer Walpole published a report on the Sea Fisheries of England and Wales 

 about which it was written:! 



On these very surfaces and in these very depths there rages, has ever raged, and ever will to the 

 end of time, a warfare compared with which historical battles sink to the dimensions of street 

 rows or family jars. It is an incessant and universal war carried on between greater numbers 

 than can be told, more species than can be well distinguished one from another, and every 

 order of existence, from the scarcely visible and scarcely animated fibre or molecule up to the 

 lords of creation. . . . Fish engaged in a universal internecine war devour many times more than 

 we can do. 



Francis Day:]: read a paper to the Linnean Society on the instincts and emotions of 

 fish. Edwin Ray Lankester, founder of the Marine Biological Association five 

 years later, was Public Examiner in Natural Science at Oxford. Edward Cope was 

 appointed head of the department of organic material of the Permanent International 

 Exhibition of Philadelphia. Alexander Agassiz was chief of the scientific staff on 

 the cruise of the George S. Blake through the West Indies. William B. Carpenter 

 resigned as Registrar of London University; this was the man who had helped to 

 induce the Admiralty, through the Council of the Royal Society, to place at his and 

 Wyville Thomson's disposal first H.M.S. Lightning (1868) and then H.M.S. 

 Porcupine (1869 and 1870) for deep-sea exploration (Thomson, 1873), and who was a 

 prime mover with the Government for the Challenger expedition "... to explore 

 and make known the conditions of life in the great oceans " (Herdman, 1923). 

 Huxley received an honorary LL.D. from Cambridge in company with Robert 

 Browning. And at younger levels, William Herdman received his B.Sc. and the 



* Author of The Natural History of British Fishes, London, 1880. 



t London Times, December 6, 1879, p. 9. 



X Author of The Fishes of Great Britain and Ireland, two volumes, London, 1880-1884, and of 

 British and Irish Salmonidae, London, 1887. 



