I call him unfortunate, for day after day that wretched man had to 

 sit on the steps and do nothing, except to take an occasional look at me, 

 as he was too polite to watch me steadily. Of course, his presence was 

 an insult to me, the kind of treatment which I have met with only in 

 France; the contrast with my experience in Germany and England 

 was most striking. 



I met the grandees of the Musee de I'Histoire Naturelle: Gaudry, 

 who struck me as a man of little force; Filhol, an able and vivacious 

 little man; Fischer, a taciturn and rather surly Alsatian, and Milne- 

 Edwards, the distinguished zoologist. I was present one day at an in- 

 formal conference of these men, minus Fischer, and was astonished 

 at the backwardness of their views, for they really seemed never to have 

 heard of Darwin, Filhol very kindly allowed me to study his remarkable 

 collection; part of which was at his country house at Sevres, where I 

 took luncheon with his family, part at his Paris apartment, in the 

 Boulevard St. Germain, and part at the museum. He had many superb 

 things, such as I saw nowhere else in Europe. 



I was anxious to visit Rheims and see Dr. Lemoine's remarkable col- 

 lection of fossils, which he had gathered on his own property. At this 

 spot is a geological formation, not well represented elsewhere in the 

 Old World, but corresponding very closely in time with certain rocks 

 in New Mexico and Wyoming. I wrote Dr. Lemoine to see if I could 

 not arrange a time to call on him and examine his fossils, but we were 

 unable to find a date that should be convenient to both of us. He was 

 so kind as to visit me at the museum and take me to his apartment 

 in Paris, where he showed me the unpublished drawings of his fossils. 

 For each one he had almost the same formula: "Chose tres drole; un 

 peu de pachyderme, un peu de carnivore, un peu d'insectivore; tres 

 drole, tres drole!" 



At a dealer's, to whom M. Filhol recommended me, I found a fine 

 collection of fossil mammals and birds from the Miocene of St. Gerand 

 le Puy. The owner asked a moderate price for it and I immediately 

 wrote home to Pyne, asking him to cable me an authorization to buy it, 

 which he promptly did, and I made the purchase from Heidelberg, 

 asking to have the bones shipped to me there. When the collection 

 arrived, it was necessary to have a new and much stronger box made for 

 it and repack the specimens in that chest for their long journey to 

 America. I was disgusted to find that the dealer had held back some 

 of the choicest specimens, for which I had paid. It was also through 

 M. Filhol's kind assistance that I was able to secure a fine lot of fossils 



C 215 ] 



