man who could use Italian, no other language being admissible. The 

 Americans selected W. W. Story, sculptor and poet, long resident in 

 Rome and an intimate friend of the King's. During the address, 

 Umberto and Story repeatedly exchanged winks, which rather de- 

 stroyed solemnity. After more than five hours of oratory, we were all 

 exhausted with the heat and muscular exertion and weak for want of 

 food. 



The banquet on Tuesday evening and the degree-giving on Wednes- 

 day I did not attend, because of intense weariness and the sustained 

 heat. I must, in closing, write down my impression that the whole cele- 

 bration was an uncommonly brilliant success. In the preparatory period, 

 the officials having it in charge seemed to be utterly confused and in- 

 efficient, but as soon as the show actually began everything went off 

 with a smoothness and precision worthy of all praise. 



At Florence I joined the ladies of my party in their pension, on the 

 Lungarno. While we were there, the news arrived that the short and 

 grief-filled reign of Kaiser Friedrich was over and the ill-fated time of 

 Wilhelm II had begun. Of course, we had no idea of the world-wide 

 cataclysm in which that time was to end, but the egotistical and impul- 

 sive character of the young Kaiser filled us with a vague uneasiness for 

 the future. I think, however, that we should have been surprised to 

 learn that the catastrophe was to be deferred for twenty-six years. 



I took advantage of being in Florence to see something of the 

 zoological museum, under Giglioli, and of the new geological museum 

 in the Piazza di San Marco. Here I met Stefani, Weithofer, of Vienna, 

 Hantkau, of Buda-Pesth, and Forsyth Major, a British subject, who 

 spoke almost any continental language better than English and pre- 

 ferred German as a means of communication. He invited Weithofer 

 and myself to visit him at his house in the village of Boscolungo, high 

 up in the Apennines, and look over the remarkable collection of fossil 

 mammals which he had just brought back from Samos. We gladly 

 accepted and, leaving Florence by an early train, we took a carriage at 

 Pracchia for a very long drive through the mountains and reached 

 Boscolungo at four. On this drive, Weithofer told me a lot of gossip 

 and scandal about the imperial family of Austria, for which he had no 

 respect whatever. Among his tales was one of an Archduke, who was 

 riding out in the country and met a peasant funeral, in which the coffin 

 was carried on a bier. Ordering the bearers to put the bier on the 

 ground, he jumped his horse back and forth over the coffin. In April 

 1925, I had, as a visitor in my house. Professor Abel, of Vienna, who 



C 210 3 



