4 MY LIFE 



asked me to lunch with him, and afterwards took- mc to 

 walk over the Druid 11 ill Park, a finely wooded hilly tract of 

 i acres, close to the town, and forming one of the most 

 picturesque recreation grounds I have seen. 1 also spent 

 an evening with Professor 1 .rooks, when we talked on Dar- 

 winian topics mainly. One day 1 dined with I 'resident Gilman, 

 and met afterwards a host of professors, students, and ladies, 



and had a very pleasant evening. Another day I called on 



Professor Ely and had a long talk on the political and social 

 outlook. In the evening he took me to a meeting of psycholo- 

 gists — professors and students — whose talk was so technical 

 as to be almost unintelligible to me, and when they asked my 

 opinion on some of their unsettled problems, I was obliged to 

 say that I had paid no attention to them, and that I was only 

 interested in the question of how far the intellectual and moral 

 nature of man could have been developed from those of the 

 lower animals through the agency of natural selection, or 

 whether they indicated some distinct origin and some higher 

 law ; and I gave them a sketch of my views as afterwards 

 developed in the last eighteen pages of my " Darwinism." 



After my last lecture (on December 9) I went to President 

 Oilman's, where I met, among others, Professor Langley, the 

 physicist. The talk was chiefly about Professor Sylvester, 

 who had excited immense interest, not only by his wonderfully 

 original mathematical genius, but also by his eccentricities 

 and self-absorption. Many anecdotes were told of him. He 

 had started to dine with a professor who lived not five minutes' 

 walk from his own house, and whom he had repeatedly visited ; 

 yet he wandered about the streets searching for it in vain, 

 and came in a full hour late. After having lived several years 

 in Baltimore, he was one day asked in the street to direct a 

 person to one of the best known public buildings, and hastily 

 replied, " Pray excuse me ; I am quite a stranger here." His 

 genius for solving puzzles in mathematics gave him an interest 

 in making rhymes. There was a remarkably pretty young lady 

 who came to one of the University festivals whose name was 

 suitable for rhyming purposes, and Sylvester started some 

 complimentary verses to see how many successive rhymes he 



