196 



The Journal of Heredity 



Coupled with this remarkable clear- 

 ness of thinking was his unusual hear- 

 ing and eyesight, and uniting them 

 was an alertness of interest, which I 

 have never seen equaled by any of my 

 many friends. His mind seemed to 

 penetrate to a deeper level than the 

 usual, and almost always discovered 

 something new w^hich filled him with 

 a wonder in which he took unfailing 

 delight. I w'as sitting beside him in 

 his study one day when his little 

 grandchild came running in wnth a 

 toy balloon in her hand to kiss him 

 goodnight. He glanced up, turned to 

 me, and said, "Isn't it wonderful! See 

 how it rises!" To the ordinary mind 

 there has ceased to be anything won- 

 derful in a toy balloon's rising ; it always 

 rises, just as the sun does. But had 

 there been in the past no brain to 

 wonder why the sun rose we should 

 still be living in the days of the flat 

 earth and accept the simple hypothesis 

 that the sun disappeared behind a 

 mountain. 



It always seemed to me that he 

 delighted to wonder. Wondering to 

 him was almost a passion. And 

 because of the peculiar clearness of his 

 brain and the keen interest which his 

 mind took in the sights and sounds 

 which went on around him, his won- 

 derings led to the discoveries for which 

 the world is indebted to him. 



LOVE OF ISOLATION 



Mr. Bell led a peculiarly isolated 

 life; I have never known anyone who 

 spent so much of his time alone. His 

 hours of work were the night hours 

 when everything was quiet. His sum- 

 mer home life was seldom interrupted 

 by the usual social responsibilities 

 which annoy most men of science. He 

 had a secluded old houseboat moored 

 on a picturesque beach on the Bras 

 D'Or Lakes where for 25 years he spent 

 many of his Saturdays and Sundays all 

 alone listening to the waves which 

 broke on the pebbly beach, and the 

 quiet sounds of the wood animals in the 

 firs and spruces around him. 



It has always seemed remarkable 

 that this isolation did not, as it has in 



so many cases, lead to a quieting down 

 of his intellectual activities. Solitude 

 seemed to stimulate them, and he 

 would sparkle with new ideas after 

 these periods of seclusion. It some- 

 times seemed as though he were rest- 

 less to be alone with his own thoughts. 

 So far as I can learn, this too was an 

 early characteristic of Mr. Bell. It 

 was an intellectual character of the 

 man which made its appearance in the 

 boy, and was not one of those habits 

 which some men acquire in mature life. 

 His love of the night was perhaps 

 another phase of his love of solitude; 

 it was not only that he wanted the 

 uninterrupted quiet of the night hours 

 for work, but he loved to be out of 

 doors at night roaming through the 

 woods or walking on the city streets. 

 Passionately fond of music he would 

 often, after everybody else had gone 

 to bed, sit down at the piano and 

 play from the great composers for 

 hours at a time. He was always at his 

 best at night, while morning found him 

 listless. 



SENSE OF ROMANCE 



Mr. Bell had what I have never 

 met with in any other person to the 

 same degree, a sense of the romance of 

 everything that occurred about him; 

 and he kept the romance of his life 

 alive by writing down the occurrences 

 of every day and later reading over to 

 himself and to his friends what he had 

 written. In this way he lived his life 

 over at least twice. He preferred this 

 to that greedier w^ay of rushing on to 

 the next event without really stopping 

 to enjoy the retrospect of the last one, 

 which is, we must all admit, the com- 

 mon way. 



This habit of life, which nothing was 

 ever allowed to interfere with, resulted 

 in the accumulation of volumes of 

 notes which make a most remarkable 

 picture of the thought-life as well as 

 the doings of this remarkable man. 

 Just as the life of Benvenuto Cellini 

 has allowed anyone who was interested 

 to stand, as it were, and look over his 

 shoulder as he wrote of the stirring 

 things in the life of a sculptor of the 



