Forfar shire 



stately manor house at Ethiebeaton, a few miles out with the 

 in the country. Mrs. Fergusson is a sister of Grant Fer z ussons 

 Allen and of our good Stanford friend, Mrs. Rushton 

 Fairclough. It was through the latter's influence 

 that one of the three Fergusson boys, James Grant, 

 a youth of remarkable ability and refinement, went 

 to Stanford rather than to Oxford where his brothers 

 were educated. 1 



The morning after our arrival Mrs. Fergusson took 

 us on a little tramp about the breezy, pine-clad high- 

 lands of Forfarshire, from which one looks down over 

 green farms to the gray North Sea. Somebody has 

 lately said with truth that "Scotland is indeed very 

 much like Oregon, only they have had more time to 

 fix it up." 



At my Dundee address in the hall of the University, A welcome 

 Dr. D'Arcy W. Thompson, my colleague on the Fur reunion 

 Seal Commission, occupied the chair, introducing me 

 graciously with the same clever skill he had shown 

 seventeen years before at our dinner in Sitka. After- 

 ward we had a sociable talk together about old times. 2 



In the Dundee Advertiser next morning appeared 

 the subjoined letter signed "One of the Audience": 



It is not often that a lecture of such a charming "unusual- 

 ness" to coin a word for the emergency is given in Dundee, 

 and one could only wish that there had been a larger audience to 

 share the quite obvious enjoyment of those who did hear it. 

 Professor Jordan's humour is of a rare and uncommon quality 

 it is strangely illuminating, and plays in a fantastic flame round 

 the thesis. He is fond of the reductio ad absurdum method of 

 proof, one of the pleasantest and cutest ways of proving your 

 theorem both for yourself and your auditors; as, for example, 

 when attacking the theory that war breeds the national virtues 



1 See also Chapter LIV, pages 743-744. 



2 See Vol. I, Chapter XXH, pages 552 and 567. 



545 U 



