and profit, but had, thereby to forego the opportunity of seeing anything 

 of Natal. Before leaving Cape Town, I received an invitation from the 

 Governor of Natal to be his guest while the Association was at Pieter- 

 maritzburg. This was embarrassing, for I felt perfectly sure that the 

 invitation was not meant for me, though name and initials were cor- 

 rectly given on the envelope. It was bad enough to decUne an invitation 

 not meant for me, but it would have been far worse to accept it. Profes- 

 sor Darwin afterwards told me that my intuition had been correct and 

 that the invitation had been meant for "another man of the same name," 

 but with different initials. 



I think it was while they were visiting the Governor of Natal that the 

 Darwins had a delightful adventure. One evening, after dinner, a 

 commotion was heard in the servants' hall, loud, angry voices and fierce 

 disputation. Much scandalised, the hostess rang the bell and, when the 

 frightened parlour maid appeared, demanded to know the meaning of 

 all that noise. The maid answered : "Please, ma'am, the butler says as 'ow 

 we was all descended from Darwin, but cook says she don't 'old with no 

 such notions." How gratified Mr. Bryan would have been, could he have 

 known that he and cook agreed. 



The Karroo party started out by rail, spending the first night at de 

 Dooms and going on the next day to Matjesfontein. Much of our travel- 

 ling was by Cape carts, high, two-wheeled, gig-like vehicles, which were 

 not very comfortable, but "they got there, just the same." The special 

 object of the excursion was to study the great thickness of rock called 

 the Dwyka Conglomerate and make up our minds whether the Dwyka 

 were a glacial moraine, as had been reported. In the party were some of 

 the foremost glacialists of the world, such as Penck of Berlin, Coleman 

 of Toronto, and Davis of Harvard, whose verdict might be relied upon 

 as competent and trustworthy. They and the others of us who, though 

 not glacial specialists, knew something of geology, were all fully 

 convinced that the Dwyka was of glacial origin. Professor Sjogren, of 

 Stockholm, who was in the party, surprised me by saying that most 

 Continental geologists refused to admit more than one glacial period, 

 shutting their eyes to the evidence. 



During most of the Karroo excursion we lived in a sleeping car but, 

 for the week-end, we were all entertained in the hotel at Matjesfontein, 

 an oasis in the desert, which had been created, at vast expense, by a rich 

 brandy-distiller, a member of the Cape Colony Parliament. After dinner, 

 one evening, I heard him deliver a tirade on the British officer, as he 

 displayed himself in the Boer War. Everywhere I went, I found similar 



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