THE LITERARY 



OF THE LINN^AN ASSOCIATION OF PENNSYLVANIA COLLEGE. 



Vol. II r. JANUARY, 1847. No. 3. 



LOOSE LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL. NO. III. 



BY J. G. M. 



There aie queer fish in all waters, and queer men in all lands. We 

 need not travel abroad to find extraordinary specimens of eccentricity, 

 but I met with one in a foreign country who is certainly worthy of a 

 description in the Journal. He is a naturalist withal, of no mean repu- 

 tation, and as such is particularly entitled to a distinguished notice in 

 your pages. I will not mention names, for most of your readers would 

 not know him, and although he himself would feel honored by this dis- 

 tinction, yet I dare not be more specific. The following leaf from my 

 journal will explain the whole. 



July 1. To-day I called on my old correspondent Herr ex-ober- 

 Lehrer M. His letters had shown that he was a singular genius, and I 

 expected to see a genuine original. I prepared myself for fun, and im- 

 agined I should see a decrepit old bachelor living in a garret, that was a 

 stranger to the broom, with cobwebs for window curtains, and two rick- 

 ety, invalid chairs for a sofa. 1 mounted three tall pair of stairs in F — 

 strasse, and knocked at the door of the eccentric naturalist. No an- 

 swer was given and leaving my card I retired. I had not been gone 

 two hours, before I received at my hotel, two large foolscap sheets writ- 

 ten full, by way of regret for his absence. lie deplored it in most dol- 

 orous terms — he regarded it as one of the most unfortunate events of 

 his life, — it added another to the numerous pangs that were daily tor- 

 menting his heart — he^did not think he could sleep that night — and a 

 long series of reiterated lamentations. He then branched ofl' into a dis- 

 quisition on some points of Natural History and asked m.e a number of 

 questions about the pigeons of the United States, stating that he was 

 writing a monograph on the Columbidae^ — he also inquired whether the 

 partridges of America had truncated tails, and of how many feathers, 

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