THE REVISION OF THE ECHINI 99 



recent defeat of the Harvard crew by Oxford on the 

 Thames. 



Early in 1870 he was busily at work in the Paris 

 museums, comparing Echini and arranging for exchanges 

 with Cambridge. In one of his letters to his stepmother 

 he writes : — 



"It has been such hard work to do the little I wanted 

 to do, for I have spent most of my time in palavers, 

 etc., etc., and it took me sometimes three days to do a 

 thing a couple of hours would have finished had not 

 all the facilities been surrounded by so many keys and 

 had I not been forced to wait for so many appointments 

 of other people, which give them half an hour only, as 

 they watch you the whole time like so many cats while 

 you are working and don't trust you a moment out of 

 their sight, which I should judge was absolutely neces- 

 sary from the habits of some of the people who come 

 to examine collections. 



" The casts are the most difficult things to obtain here ; 

 they will not sell them, and will only exchange them 

 on a principle I do not like, that is, you must pick out 

 yourself all you want, pack it yourself and then at the 

 other end of line do the same thing again. I had really 

 to be almost impolite and tell them I could not receive 

 things on those terms ; otherwise my whole stay in Paris 

 would simply have been a transfer of my Museum work 

 from Cambridge to Paris, which I had no idea of doing ; 

 as it was I spent nearly three weeks going to the Jardin 

 and Ecole de Mines to do what would under ordinary 

 circumstances have taken me at the outside four or five 

 days, and which has made me swear I would have no- 

 thing more to do with any Museum during my stay here 



