broke his leg, there was no reason for, and much against, his hurrying 

 back to his laboratory, but I think he more or less enjoyed seeing 

 Avhether he could do it or not. 



Dr. Abel belonged to that generation Avhich has just passed, in 

 which men still liked to think that they might know about everything 

 althotigh they were perfectly well a^vare of the fact that they could 

 not. I believe, however, that this irritated Professor Abel consider- 

 ably. He seemed a trifle jealous of Dr. Welch, who had such an un- 

 believable memory and who seemed to have had some firsthand ex- 

 perience with almost everything that had happened in medicine. 

 When a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica came out, he 

 confided to me that he had heard that Dr. Welch was reading it from 

 cover to cover, but I know that he read a great deal of it himself 

 with a great deal of interest, for he used to point out the mistakes in 

 it and tell me how much better the German encyclopedias ^vere. He 

 used to like to dabble with Greek and Latin and has sent me post- 

 cards written in Greek, ivhich I hope were more intelligible to him 

 than to me. I dropped in on him one time at Randolph, New Hamp- 

 shire, where he used to spend the summers, and foimd him studying 

 Latin grammar. He explained to me how he had tramped over the 

 whole Presidential range with his sons, and another time he told me 

 how he had spent several smnmers cruising from Baltimore up to the 

 coast of Maine and back. This was no mean undertaking for a man 

 unaccustomed to the sea. He apparently went at it with gieat thor- 

 oughness, however, hired a skipper and a good-sized boat, and took 

 his family over these many miles of ocean without a mishap. I found, 

 however, that Mrs. Abel was none too pleased with some of these trips. 

 When a storm came up, the Professor felt that the deck Avas no place 

 for a woman, and he not only put her below but shut all the hatches 

 in a supposedly seamanship manner, and Mrs. Abel admitted that 

 these were not the best days she had ever enjoyed. 



The Professor also had a fondness for mathematics and physics, 

 but I never realized what a sacred field this was until one day, while 

 we were having luncheon, Rouiller was extracting a vacuum desic- 

 cator by means of a very noisy water pump, and Professor Abel got 

 into an argument with one of the staff members as to Avhether mole- 

 cules could or could not pass through a hole in the desiccator in a 

 certain way. I do not remember what the argument Avas about but 

 only that I heard the Professor say that molecules could not pass 

 through this hole, and I made the unfortunate statement that I 

 thought I could make them pass through so fast that they would 



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