have been accessible. The unstinted hospitaUty of the museums was sup- 

 plemented by the kindness which sent us many transportable specimens 

 for fuller study and more elaborate illustration. 



While our tour was replete with delightful experiences, our pleasure 

 was sadly diminished by the effects of the great drought which were so 

 distressingly visible in Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota; the 

 "Dust Bowl" proper we did not see. 



Another great sorrow befell me in October 1935 in the death of 

 Harry Osborn, which, happily, was most calm and peaceful. These 

 memoirs will have been written in vain, if there should be any doubt 

 as to the close relations of mutual affection between us for nearly sixty 

 years. In Davidoff's phrase, which always amused him so much, it 

 must henceforth and to the end be "Scott ohne Osborn." 



On my eightieth birthday, February 12, 1938, my friends gave me a 

 delightful dinner in Procter Hall, of the Graduate College, and I may 

 bring this rambling narrative to a fitting end by repeating the sub- 

 stance of the concluding remarks that I made on that occasion. The 

 speech was necessarily impromptu, for I could not know, in advance, 

 to what I should have to reply, and no note was made of anything 

 there said, but I do remember saying: "I have long striven, and with 

 some measure of success, to cultivate 'a mind at leisure from itself.' If 

 I may, without presumption, I should like to appropriate to myself the 

 phrases that Darwin used near the end of his life: 'I feel no remorse 

 from having committed any great sin, but have often and often re- 

 gretted that I have not done more direct good to my fellow creatures.' 

 Yet I console myself with the idea which George Eliot expressed at the 

 end of Middemarch, in words which have long been a kind of motto 

 to me: 'For the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon 

 unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they 

 might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a 

 hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs' " 



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