128 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



marked the real nature of the Yankee life. He had not much to 

 give, but he revealed to me that things were "not as deep as a 

 well nor as wide as a church door"; and this gift helped much 

 to reconcile me to a society which, seen on its face, was to one 

 of my breeding by no means inviting. He soon passed out of 

 my sight, but not from memory, which holds him dear. His 

 was the common fate of Yoricks to be forgotten before they 

 are dust; in certain ways, high ways, they are the best of their 

 times, but because a laugh cannot be perpetuated, they fall into 

 quick forgetfulness, or at best they have an echo in the hearts 

 of those who knew them. 



William Stimpson was a naturalist of no mean capacity. If 

 he had not been turned to species-describing, a task akin to 

 "gerund grinding," he would have come to largeness. As it 

 was, his keen interest in animals of all kinds, his real love for 

 them, made him something much better than his printed work. 

 It was his affection for creatures as well as his general wit that 

 quickly brought us together. Stimpson was much my senior, 

 probably by ten years or more. He had rather cut loose from 

 Agassiz, for he had a fierce independence of spirit which did not 

 allow him to profit by mastery. Yet he now and then worked in 

 the laboratory, at that time on molluscs. We used to debate 

 the Darwinian hypothesis privately, for to be caught at it was 

 as it is for the faithful to be detected in a careful study of a 

 heresy. We had both read the " Vestiges of the Natural History 

 of Creation," Lamarck's "Philosophic Zoologique," and first 

 the Darwin- Wallace papers and then the newly published " Ori- 

 gin of Species." Agassiz had given a large part of his lectures 

 in one term to denouncing these works, and to the assertion 

 that species were absolute creations. He never even suggested 

 how the special creation came about, and when, at the end of 

 a lecture, I pressed him for some conception of how a species 

 first appeared, he stated that it was a " thought of God," thereby 

 showing the curious mysticism which lay at the foundation of 

 his nature. The logic of these views bothered Stimpson less than 



