THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



members of President Wilson's cabinet (they were nearly all 

 Club members) waiting for a chance for a seat. 



Along in October, 1917, we began to notice the increasing 

 number of uniforms of the officers of the allied armies. They 

 had been sent over from England, France and Italy. They were 

 nearly all experts in some special line, and had been sent to the 

 United States to assist us in our manifold preparations. Not 

 only were these men selected by their governments for their 

 skilled knowledge in branches of science whose applications to 

 war purposes had been discovered and enormously developed 

 during the previous year or two, but they were chosen also, 

 apparently, for their attractive personalities, and, very naturally, 

 for their command of the English language. The latter point 

 had been especially forced upon us the summer before. One 

 night I was sitting in the reading room of the Club, and some 

 man from the State Department came in and said, "Oh, Doctor, 

 you're just the man I want to see. You speak French. Come 

 and meet some of the French scientific men who have just 

 arrived." I went into the big reception room and found six fine- 

 looking Frenchmen in the beautiful French uniform, and was 

 introduced. Among them were Professor Henri Abram, of 

 Paris; Professor Fabbri, of Marseilles; the Due de Guiche, a 

 famous amateur physicist of Paris; and three others whose 

 names I have forgotten. Dr. Henry S. Washington and I kept 

 up a somewhat laborious conversation with these men in the 

 French language until, at the expiration of an hour or two, it 

 gradually dawned on us that they all spoke English much better 

 than we did French. 



Along in October I happened to be talking at luncheon at 

 the National Museum with Austin H. Clark, a Harvard gradu- 

 ate, and a well-known oceanographer, who had travelled all 

 over the world. At that time he was possibly thirty-five years 



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