208 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



Though I hungered for the society of like-minded mates, there 

 were in all not more than two score with whom I had even the 

 chance of such acquaintance as might lead to intimacy. There 

 is a common notion that Agassiz had a great following of young 

 men, but in the three years I was with him as a pupil, two of 

 them the best of his teaching time, there were never more than 

 a dozen youths who belonged to his group; and some of these 

 were of a social quality that did not attract me. The most of 

 my associates, outside of half a dozen in Agassiz's group of stu- 

 dents, were in the other separate folds of the Scientific School ; 

 one or two with Asa Gray and Wyman, and a few with Cooke 

 in the department of chemistry. I also came to know some of 

 the young men who were in the Nautical Almanac office, then 

 kept in a house on the north side of the Cambridge Common. 

 I had also some contact with two or three young men who were 

 connected with the Observatory, especially with Philip Sidney 

 Coolidge, of whom I have already said much. With the youths 

 in the College, none of us had much to do, except when, as in 

 the case of Leslie Waggener, there were special reasons for our 

 coming together. I had a "hail-fellow-well-met" relation with 

 perhaps half a dozen of these academic youths, and an affection 

 for some of them, but save in Waggener's case nothing that 

 could be called friendship ever came from our contacts. As a 

 group they seemed to me tiresome, with no intensity of purpose 

 and a very limited sense of the world; at that time I had a 

 preposterous sense of my insight into the doings of the sphere. 

 Looking back on myself in my undergraduate days, I am 

 inclined to suspect that I may have been a bit priggish ; yet 

 when I remember that I was one of the noisiest, and the leader 

 in sundry larks and with a humor for fighting, I am inclined 

 to believe that there was a fair share of unconsciousness in my 

 life; my relations with my mates bear this out. While I had 

 nothing to do with their hard drinking, then a common vice with 

 the groups I knew, nor with other forms of dissipation, our 

 relations seemed none the worse because of these limitations. 



