ALABAMA. 113 



of New Jersey. Before noon on March 26, he had crossed 

 the Delaware and had set foot in Philadelphia. 



In the Quaker city he had an old friend, one of his 

 former fellow-clerks at Carbonear, Mr. W. F. Lush, settled 

 in the office of the American Colonization Society. This 

 young man carried him off to his own boarding-house, 

 where Gosse also took lodgings, and stayed very pleasantly 

 for above three weeks. In this establishment were several 

 other young fellows, comrades of Lush's, who received the 

 new-comer agreeably. The long solitary years in Canada, 

 however, had set an indelible mark on the face and 

 manners of the naturalist. He found it impossible to join 

 in their gaiety of conversation, and they asked Lush 

 privately if " Gosse was a minister," being struck with his 

 fluent gravity in monologue and lack of capacity for small- 

 talk. It was in Philadelphia that he first enjoyed the 

 sympathy and help of genuine men of science. At the 

 museum in Chestnut Street, he met Mr. Titian R. Peale, 

 a local zoological artist of considerable eminence, who 

 charmed him at once, and surprised him by his deferential 

 civility and his instinctive recognition of this grim-featured, 

 unknown youth as one destined to be " somebody." Mr. 

 Peale was just then starting as the artist of an exploring 

 expedition to the South Seas, under Lieutenant Charles 

 Wilkes, and he was particularly interested in the exquisite 

 drawings of insects which Philip Gosse had brought from 

 Canada. A more distinguished man of science was Pro- 

 fessor Thomas Nuttal, the botanist, whom he discovered 

 in the herbarium of the Academy of Natural Science. In 

 his diary my father calls him "venerable/' although he was 

 little more than fifty at the time. By Professor Nuttal's 

 invitation, he attended an evening meeting of the society, 

 and met many of the American savants. The distinguished 

 Philadelphian zoologist, Dr. Joseph Leidy, then a boy of 



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