532 SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY. 



I came into official contact Avith him because of his very great interest 

 in and constant demand for books of every nature. By chance I 

 found that he was a collector of translations of the Arabian Nights 

 and had read all the editions in English and French available. I 

 liai^pened to tell him of my own interest in the subject and the fact 

 that as a student I had read portions of the Arabian Nights in the 

 original. There then began a closer acquaintanceship which, I am 

 proud to say. resulted in a friendship which has been to me one of 

 the most profoundly valuable and touching experiences of my life. 

 He was a very shy man and greatly feared that he might obtrude 

 himself upon others or that an advance that he might make would 

 prove unwelcome. He was also, like some other mathematicians and 

 astronomers, at times very much abstracted and with a painfully bad 

 memory for names, or, rather, an inability to associate faces and 

 names — a difficulty which he told me had nothing to do with his 

 scientific studies, but was inherited and belonged to his father, who 

 was a merchant. This difficulty he attempted to hide as far as 

 possible, producing upon the average man the conviction that he was 

 dealing with a very haughty and distant individual — a deduction 

 which was very far from the truth. 



Living here without family ties, coming in his fifty-third year, 

 almost after the period when men make close friendships, his hunger 

 for real friendship and affection was pathetic. Most of the men with 

 whom he came into contact were of another generation, and it was a 

 genuine revelation to see him, as I sometimes did, with a friend of his 

 youth, a man of his own age whom he had known for many years. 

 He was a most rigidly truthful man — not truthful in any ordinary 

 sense, but in that extraordinary Puritan, New England sense, which 

 did not even permit him to subscribe himself as being " very sincerely, 

 yours," if he Avas not. 



I have alluded above to the fact that he himself ascribed his inter- 

 est in aerial navigation to a childish wonder as to how the great 

 heavy birds Avhich he used to watch in a New England pasture could 

 fly and maintain themselves in the air, and in another place he has 

 told us that his work on the sun also grew out of a childish interest 

 in this great center of our system upon which life on this planet 

 depends. I think that these two ideas of his were not fancies, but 

 that it was a fact that in his case especially the child was father to 

 the man. One of his favorite quotations was the initial stanzas of 

 the i)oem of AVordsworth : 



Who is the happy warrior? Who is he 

 That every man in arms should wish to be? 

 It is the generous spirit, who, when brought 

 Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought 

 Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought. 



