110 MY LIFE [Chap. 



Breakfast Table several times afterwards, and once called at 

 his house and had a two hours' private conversation. He was 

 very interesting from his constant flow of easy conversation ; 

 but when 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 

 Boston, and I attended several of its meetings, at one of 

 which I heard Professor Langley explain his wonderful dis- 

 covery of the extension of the heat-spectrome 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 most 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 Archae- 

 ology. 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 





