January 17, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



63 



time. But Corsica had charmed him; he re- 

 visited that romantic isle the following sum- 

 mer, and this time carried back the famous 

 Mouflon, hero of great adventures, the tell- 

 ing of which in print to the invisible public 

 can not, however, compare with the oral recital, 

 not many years after the event, to a group 

 of admiring boys around a camp tire in the 

 woods of upper Michigan. 



Let no one imagine that a glance over these 

 selected items can replace the reading of the 

 delightful autobiography which they intro- 

 duce. What is here too briefly told is only a 

 curtain raiser to the kaleidoscopic life led by 

 this fascinating boy after he reached man- 

 hood. No abstract can do justice to his thrill- 

 ing adventures as a mining engineer in 

 Arizona — amazing revelations of the condi- 

 tions that existed when there really was a 

 western frontier; had Beadle, a famout lit- 

 terateur of that time, known them, they would 

 have made him despair over the poverty of his 

 dime-novel inventions. Mining and smelting 

 in Arizona were followed by geological ex- 

 plorations in Japan -and China ; it was in that 

 epoch that our hero during a smallpox delir- 

 ium, playfully fired his revolver, which had 

 been, Arizona-fashion, left handy under the 

 mattress, at his Chinese nurse, who thereuijou 

 selfishlj- resigned his post. The winter jour- 

 ney homeward across Siberia in a sleigh, dur- 

 ing which, as a chapter-heading might put it, 

 " A whifF of cigarette smoke passes the time 

 o'day," is not likely to be repeated by the 

 modern traveler, who finds even the Trans- 

 Baikal express too slow. Then came a period 

 of conventional life in New York where some 

 conmionplacc years were passed; and this was 

 followed b.y a humdrum engagement as pro- 

 fessor of mining at Harvard; but very little 

 did the professorial Pumpelly of those days 

 resemble the customary philosopher plodding 

 across the Common to a lecture, or the expect- 

 able mathematician trudging through the 

 Delta after a faculty meeting. Indeed, it was 

 credibly reported at the time that a street- 

 urchin — a " mucker " in the slang of Harvard 

 Square — on seeing this strange apparition in 

 felt hat, long flowing beard, velveteen suit and 



riding boots, cantering along Kirkland Street, 

 stopped in astonishment, exclaiming: "Golly, 

 what a swell!" 



Naturally enough the cantering gait, which 

 so well suited the apparition, soon carried 

 him out of Cambridge and into all parts of 

 the country, as mining engineer, state geolo- 

 gist, director of the Northern Transcontinental 

 Survey, and otherwise ; until in 1903-04 he 

 welcomed the approach of old age by conduct- 

 ing a rare journey of exploration, a Carnegie- 

 Institution search for primitive man, into 

 central Asia. Ten years later an excursion 

 was made to Arizona: in the shadow of the 

 loss of wife and mother, the father with son 

 and daughters, who left their own children at 

 home to make themselves boy and girls again, 

 visited the frontier of 1860, where desperados 

 then dwelt and where railroads, hotels and 

 automobiles now flourish locally in the wide 

 arid spaces. " Incidents '' occurred of course, 

 such as the near-loss of a toe, and a possible 

 death from thirst in a dry stream bed; but 

 these little affairs did not prevent a deeji 

 appreciation of the great empty wilderness 

 with its glaring days of vast distances, and 

 its calm nights below the starlit vault of the 

 cloudless heavens. And from the desert the 

 septuagenarian, once the boy pirate of Owego, 

 the knight errant of Corsica, the student of 

 Freiberg, the Arizona miner, the traveler in 

 the Far East, the expert geological surveyor, 

 the archeological explorer, all reaching their 

 culmination in the genial grandfather, re- 

 turned to his home in Newport to write his 

 " Eeminiscences." There his friends now find 

 liim in beautiful serenity. There the good 

 wishes of many greatful readers attend him. 

 W. M. D. 



PROFESSOR WILLIAMS AT YALEi 



Cornell and Yale are singularly linked in 

 the life of Henry Shaler Williams. Professor 

 Williams was born at Ithaca, graduated from 

 Yale, then returned to Ithaca to teach at 



1 Address by Herbert E. Gregory, representing 

 Yale University at the exercises in memory of 

 Henry Shaler Williams, held at Sage Chapel, Cor- 

 nell University, October 20, 1918. 



