750 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1064 



and for his narratives of his own personal 

 experiences and of those of others. One 

 incident, the truth of which I have no rea- 

 son to doubt, was that of two of his acquain- 

 tances, who loaded two dories from the 

 flesh of a giant squid, which they found 

 floating at the surface, leaving an amount 

 which they estimated would have made 

 another dory load. Other incidents of his 

 narrating were not meant to be taken liter- 

 ally, as, when speaking of his experiences 

 in Copenhagen, when attending an interna- 

 tional fisheries meeting, where he said that 

 it rained so much that horses frightened at 

 a person who was not carrying an umbrella. 

 Then there was his story of the commander 

 of a vessel, who, sailing into his home port 

 on the Norway coast when there happened 

 to be no fog, did not recognize the place, 

 and accordingly put out to sea, when, the 

 usual fog setting in, he succeeded in a few 

 hours in making his own familiar harbor. 



Captain H. C. Chester had charge of the 

 collecting apparatus and superintended 

 the dredging operations. The trawls and 

 nets were stored in what is now called the 

 Stone Building, then known as the Old 

 Candle Factory. Captain Chester was an 

 ingenious and true son of the Nutmeg state. 

 His inventive genius was highly valued by 

 Professor Baird, as an examination of the 

 Reports will show. He abounded in quaint 

 and original humor. He had had much ex- 

 perience as a sea-faring man. It was well 

 known among us that Captain Chester had 

 taken a prominent part in the Polaris ex- 

 pedition, and that it had been due to his 

 unflagging good-spirits in the presence of 

 intense cold and extreme privation that the 

 party that returned by land was brought 

 through safely. We often tried to get him 

 to tell us about that expedition but never 

 succeeded. He preferred to talk about 

 Noank, Connecticut, which he invariably 

 spoke of as "the garden spot of the earth," 



and a famous variety of apple, which his 

 father developed to grow in an orchard on 

 a steep hill side. These apples, he averred, 

 were flat on one side, which kept them from 

 rolling down hill into his neighbor's field 

 below. 



Sanderson Smith I remember as an 

 elderly man, probably Professor Baird 's 

 senior. I think that he had been an engi- 

 neer by profession, but with a strong bent 

 towards natural history. His work for the 

 commission, besides looking after the mol- 

 lusca, consisted in tabulating results of 

 soundings, dredgings, temperature data, 

 and the like. He was a model of good na- 

 ture, more ready to do favors for others 

 than to minister to his own comfort. In 

 those days there were many visitors to the 

 laboratory and Sanderson was always ready 

 to drop his work, which the rest of us some- 

 times did reluctantly, to show visitors over 

 the laboratory. James H. Bmerton, Pro- 

 fessor Verrill's artist, was very patient 

 under these visitations to his table, but one 

 day, I remember, he complained vigorously 

 because some of the visitors had breathed 

 down the back of his neck as they were 

 watching him make a sketch. 



Soon after we moved into the new resi- 

 dence building some of us one morning 

 found Sanderson looking with a much 

 puzzled expression at the new clock, across 

 the face of which was printed a direction 

 for winding, but which he was interpreting 

 as a weather forecast. Pointing to it with 

 an air of indignant agitation he said: 

 "Why, why, why, what, what, what does 

 that mean? 'Wind every Monday morn- 

 ing'!" 



Leslie A. Lee was a most cheery and well- 

 beloved member of Professor Baird 's larger 

 family in the 80 's. He was an enthusi- 

 astic collector, capable of the best work, but 

 whose love of collecting and of first-hand 



