438 Presidentship of Thomas Henry Huxley 1884 



Deinosaurs. He was thus specially drawn towards the 

 Geological Society, of which he was for five years Treasurer 

 and two years President. He was elected into the Royal 

 Society in 1867. 



Among the nineteen visitors this year, two stand out as 

 conspicuous personalities Alfred Newton and Captain 

 William James Lloyd Wharton. One of the foremost 

 zoologists of his day in this country and Professor of 

 Zoology in the University of Cambridge, Alfred Newton 

 was not only an eminent authority on his own subject, 

 but his wide range of reading and his well-trained critical 

 faculty made him also a shrewd judge in many other 

 spheres of investigation. His " Dictionary of Birds," one 

 of his latest works, forms an enduring monument not only 

 of his great scientific acquirements but of his learning and 

 his mastery of concise English. His rooms at Magdalene 

 College were one of the centres of intellectual life at the 

 University. His interest in undergraduates who showed 

 any bent towards science led him to take infinite pains to 

 help them. To many of them his Sunday evenings, even 

 though blue with tobacco smoke, were memorable times 

 in their college days. Those who knew him only as he 

 appeared at Cambridge or at the meetings of the Royal 

 Society would hardly have recognised him had they been 

 spirited away to him on his annual yachting voyage, 

 which he kept up as long as his health and strength 

 allowed. Dressed in a grey tweed suit that had seen much 

 service, perched on the most exposed part of the vessel, 

 scorning a top-coat even in a gale of wind, with a pipe in 

 his mouth and a canister of tobacco beside him, he lost, 

 in the course of a few days, all trace of the pale scholar. 

 His face glowed with a deep crimson tint and the skin on 

 his nose began to curl up and flake off. And there he 

 would sit for hours, watching every bird that passed, 

 and with unfailing certainty and precision recognising 

 each species and variety on the wing. He was on such 

 occasions the most delightful companion, always cheerful 

 in spite of wind and weather and his lameness, always 



