THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



Darwin's famous "Origin of Species." As was quite to be 

 expected, this point was seized upon at once by people of different 

 sects, and the lecture was played up in the newspapers as a 

 tremendous blow to the whole Darwinian hypothesis. Bateson 

 was a delightful man — a tall old fellow with beetling gray eye- 

 brows. He made an after-dinner speech at the annual dinner of 

 the American Society of Naturalists, held during this Toronto 

 meeting. He was the first speaker, and had not finished his cigar 

 when he was called upon. He did not discard his cigar when 

 he rose to speak, but would occasionally stop in the course of his 

 remarks, and puff on it a bit. The next day, meeting him at 

 a luncheon, I said to him, "Professor Bateson, some of us were 

 a bit worried last night at the difficulty that you had in keeping 

 your cigar going while you were speaking. In fact, one of us left 

 the room immediately after your speech and spent the rest of 

 the night trying to invent an apparatus by means of which 

 an after-dinner speaker can smoke and speak at the same time." 



The fine old chap beamed down upon me under his beetling 

 eyebrows and remarked, "Fancy! What an extraordinary people 

 you Americans are!" 



I must say a little about that remarkable man, Charles W. 

 Eliot. I met him first at the Boston meeting in the summer of 

 1898. As President of Harvard, he very naturally made one of the 

 principal addresses of welcome. I was not especially impressed 

 by his personality, but I was by the great respect and affection 

 which the Boston people apparently had for him. Most of them 

 seemed to think that he could not possibly make a mistake — 

 that he was all-wise. As an outsider and familiar only with the 

 broad aspects of his career, I rather wondered at this. 



During the World War there was some talk of abandoning 

 one of the annual meetings on account of upset conditions. 

 TraveUing was difficult. Trains were fewer and were over- 



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