particularly anxious to see, for my Mother had been there as a young 

 girl, in 1845, I think, and often told me of it. From Quebec we went to 

 the newly opened copper mines of Noranda and thence to Winnipeg, 

 where I left the party and turned back to Chicago, having there an 

 appointment with my friend and one-time pupil, E. S. Riggs, of the 

 Field Museum. On behalf of the Museum, Mr. Riggs had made some 

 highly successful collecting expeditions to South America and had some 

 wonderful things to show me, which he subsequently entrusted to me 

 for description and publication, thereby earning my enthusiastic grati- 

 tude. After the first day's experiences in the Museum, I wrote to my 

 oldest daughter Adeline, who had taken her family to London for a 

 three years' stay, of a marvellous experience. 



Of the disastrous stock-market collapse of October 1929 it would be 

 superfluous to speak, for the lapse of ten years has brought little improve- 

 ment and, like millions of other people, we had to put up with drastic 

 reductions of income, and these were not helped by my retirement from 

 active service at the Commencement of 1930, which marked the close of 

 the half-century since my appointment in 1880. I submitted, with much 

 reluctance (not diminished by the consolation prize of an honorary 

 degree) but with such grace as I could assume, to the inevitable effects 

 of merciless Time, yet found a large degree of consolation in the com- 

 plete freedom to devote all my efforts to my palaeontological studies. 

 From a purely personal, not to say selfish, point of view, the chief ele- 

 ment in the successful pursuit of happiness is to have an abundance of 

 work that one enjoys doing, assuming, of course, satisfactory "domestic 

 relations." The task immediately at hand was the preparation of new 

 editions of my Geology and History of Land Mammals, both of which 

 demanded complete rewriting, and then there were ambitious plans for 

 palaeontological monographs which involved great labour and large 

 expense and which were made possible only by the generous policy of 

 the American Philosophical Society. 



President Hibben's resignation in 1932, at his fiftieth reunion, was 

 soon followed by his tragic death in a motor accident. With his suc- 

 cessor. Dr. Harold Dodds, I have had hardly any contact at all, being 

 without official duties, but everything that I hear promises one of the 

 outstanding administrations in our history. 



The winter of 1932-33 we spent at Cataumet and were much more 

 comfortable than might have been expected; throughout the winter I 

 made the round trip of 120 miles to Cambridge on every week-day, and 



