GIFT TO MUSEUM FROM THE SCHOOL. 531 



old teacher, as well as their interest in his 

 work, and in the institution he had founded. 

 His letter of acknowledgment to the one 

 among them who had acted as their treasurer 

 makes a fitting close to this chapter. 



. . . Hardly anything in my life has touched 

 me more deeply than the gift I received this 

 week from my school-girls. From no source 

 in the world could sympathy be more genial 

 to me. The money I shall appropriate to a 

 long-cherished scheme of mine, a special work 

 in the Museum which must be exclusively my 

 own, — the arrangement of a special collec- 

 tion illustrating in a nutshell, as it were, all the 

 relations existing among animals, — which I 

 have deferred because other things were more 

 pressing, and our means have been insufficient. 

 The feeling that you are all working with me 

 will be even more cheering than the material 

 help, much needed as that is. I wish I could 

 write to each individually. I shall try to find 

 some means of expressing my thanks more 

 widely. Meantime I write to you as treas- 

 urer, and beg you, as far as you can do so 

 without too much trouble, to express my grat- 

 itude to others. Will you also say to those 

 whom you chance to meet that I shall be at 



I 



