1958 
Deichmann — Elizabeth Bangs Bryant 
7 
one time an over eager Community Chest agent tried to 
persuade her to give her large contribution through the 
Museum instead of just the token which she usually gave. 
But she was adamant, her contribution was going to where 
it had been going for years, long before the Community 
Chest had been established. The argument became rather 
heated: “It was her duty toward the Museum.” Then Miss 
Bryant got up: “My resignation shall be on the Director’s 
desk this afternoon!” The subject was quickly dropped. 
When she had been fifty years out of college she received 
an honorary Phi Beta Kappa membership from Radcliffe 
as the one of her class who had made the most out of her 
education, and this was a great pleasure to her. But she 
appreciated it even more when, at about the same time, 
she was taken into the Radcliffe Sigma Xi, for this enabled 
her to get into contact with young people, a pleasure which 
her duties toward her mother had prevented for years. 
Contrary to her custom of never going out in the evening, 
she would attend all their evening meetings. 
She continued working after her retirement in 1950, it 
seemed almost with even greater vigor than before. Several 
years before that time the difficulties the museum had, and 
still would have for years, regarding decent pay to the 
curators were clearly seen by us all; she had also seen how 
the Boston Natural History Museum had packed several 
collections aside and had given others away to where they 
could be used, and she realized that a similar fate might 
well befall the collections which she was in charge of. Sud- 
denly she realized that she was able to act so that this 
should not happen. It was with deep emotion that she one 
day came to me and told me that she had radically altered 
her will so that the work could go on after her death and 
she was a changed person from that moment. Her plans for 
her work became bolder and she decided to get a new and 
better microscope even at this late time of her life. 
It was when I came home from a trip in the fall of 1952 
that she informed me that she was not feeling well and that 
an operation was necessary because of stomach cancer. 
After the operation I saw her two or three times a week 
at her home and our conversations went on almost as if she 
