THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



was not immediately recognized, added, "Je suis PoincarS. Vous 

 vous rappellez que vous in'avez invite personellement." 



"Why," said Newcomb, somewhat staggered and for the mo- 

 ment forgetting himself, "you said you couldn't come." Then, 

 recovering himself, he smiled broadly and went on, "]e suis 

 enchante — " etc., etc. 



When Newcomb died some years later in Washington his 

 friends held a memorial meeting, and I was one of the speakers. 

 As was quite proper, the other speakers were solemn on the 

 whole, but I permitted myself to tell the story I have just 

 related. Mrs. Newcomb and her daughters were there, and 

 I had some doubt as to how they would receive it. But they 

 said that they were very pleased, and Mr. James Bryce, who 

 was one of the other speakers, told me that he thought the 

 incident was characteristic of Newcomb. 



After Newcomb retired from the Naval Observatory, he took 

 his luncheons regularly at the Cosmos Club, and he sat by 

 preference, not with the scientific men, but with a group of 

 architects. He told me that he thought architects v/ere the most 

 congenial people in the world. That to me was a new light on 

 the great man's character. 



The proceedings and transactions of this St. Louis Congress 

 were published in a series of volumes that constitute a great 

 record. 



In 1907, the Seventh International Congress of Zoology was 

 held at Boston, Massachusetts, under the presidency of Charles 

 Sedgwick Minot, the distinguished comparative anatomist and 

 embryologist of the Harvard Medical College. It is not my 

 intention to write about the proceedings of this congress or 

 of any of the other meetings of this kind that I attended. At 

 least, I shall not write about them in a serious way. But in some 



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