CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 



SOUTH AFRICAN EXCURSION 



OF all the sea-voyages that I have made, the only one which I 

 wished to have prolonged was that on the Red Star liner Finnland, 

 which sailed from New York on July 8, 1905. The reason for this 

 unprecedented phenomenon was to be found in the very unusual 

 character of the passenger Hst. Such a proportion of agreeable and 

 cultivated people, I have rarely encountered at sea. When, after nine days 

 of pleasant weather, I landed at Dover and saw the ship start off again 

 for Antwerp, I was really sorry to leave her. I crossed directly to Paris, 

 where there was some material in the museum, which I wished to see 

 because of its bearing on my South American work. Thence I went to 

 Stuttgart, to see my publisher and, incidentally, to inspect the remarkable 

 treasures of fossils which Fraas had been collecting in Egypt. Heidel- 

 berg, of course, and Frankfort, to see the lithographers, were taken on 

 the way to England. 



In London, I had to attend to various items of business connected 

 with the Patagonian Reports and, especially, to consult with R. Bowdler 

 Sharpe, chief ornithologist of the British Museum. After we had 

 finished our discussions, Dr. Sharpe invited me to lunch with his 

 daughter and himself at a nearby restaurant. The conversation during 

 and after that meal has remained fixed in my memory, for it was a 

 strange mixture of gaiety and bitterness of heart. He let me see plainly 

 how deeply he was pained by his failure of election to the Royal Society, 

 membership in which is the goal of ambition to every scientific man in 

 Britain. He said that the Hmited number of zoologists who could be 

 elected in any one year was always taken up by young men from the 

 universities. One professor would say: "I've got a young man who can 

 cut a leech into three pieces, we must elect him." Another would say: 

 "My man cut the leech into four pieces; we must take him without 

 fail," and so the contempt of the systematist for the microscopist and 



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