no MY LIFE 



we were alone he turned our talk on Spiritualism, in which he 



was much interested and which he was evidently inclined 

 to accept, though he had little personal knowledge of the 

 phenomena. 



The National Academy of Science was now sitting at Bos- 

 ton, and 1 attended several of its meetings, at one of which I 

 heard Professor Langley explain his wonderful discovery of 

 the extension of the heat-spectrum by means of his new 

 instrument, the bolometer. At another meeting Professor 

 Cope read a paper, while Professor Marsh was in the chair, 

 evidently to his great annoyance, as the relations of these 

 great palaeontologists were much as were those of Owen and 

 Huxley after i860. At another meeting the question of 

 geographical distribution came up, and Professor Asa Gray 

 called on me to say something. I was rather taken aback, 

 and could think of nothing else but the phenomena of seed 

 dispersal by the wind, as shown by the varying proportion of 

 endemic species in oceanic islands, and by the total absence in 

 the Azores of all those genera whose seeds could not be air- 

 borne (either by winds or birds), thus throwing light upon 

 some of the m'ost curious facts in plant-distribution. I think 

 the subject, as I put it, was new to most of the naturalists 

 present. 



I went several times to Cambridge in order to examine 

 carefully the two important museums there — the Agassiz 

 Museum of Zoology and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology. 

 Both are admirable, and Mr. Alexander Agassiz kindly showed 

 me over every part of the former museum, an account of 

 which I have given in the second volume of my " Studies, 

 Scientific and Social." 



One day I spent at Salem on a visit to Professor Edward 

 Morse and his pleasant family. He had lived several years 

 in Japan, and had made a very extensive collection of Japanese 

 pottery, ancient and modern. He has about four thousand 

 specimens, all distinct, many of great rarity and value. I also 

 dined with Professor Asa Gray to meet most of the biological 

 professors of Harvard University. After dinner he asked me 

 to give them some account of how I was led to the theory of 



