SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY. 
23 
as to the duties which each one would be expected to per- 
form during the very few moments when the phenomenon 
was observable. 
One would naturally suppose that what has gone before 
at least fully described a single man; indeed, it relates 
enough to fill the lifetime of two or three men ; yet it by no 
means adequately goes to make the full picture. I have al- 
luded above to his having been an omnivorous reader; but 
this is too general an expression to give any idea of the ex- 
tent of his literary cultivation. He knew the German clas- 
sics, but had, like many men of his generation, an especial 
fondness for Heinrich Heine. It is not too much to say that 
he knew everything good in English, though he had some, 
special interests 'and had become an ardent Borrovian. He 
personally owned a considerable selection of the original 
manuscript of George Borrow, and aided in the preparation 
of the Life of Borrow by Knapp, visiting him at Oxford 
and furnishing suggestions and information for this in- 
teresting work. The History of England and, even more, 
the history of France engaged his attention. He was at one 
period of his life an ardent admirer of Thomas Carlyle, 
whose personal acquaintance he enjoyed, and it is not im- 
possible that from him he acquired a sort of method of his- 
torical reading, for he looked to men rather than to docu- 
ments of the periods as furnishing the keynotes for the 
progress of nations. Leonardo da Vinci, and Cromwell, and 
Frederick the Great, and Louis XIV., and Napoleon, and 
Lincoln were some of the men about whom he had read 
everything available to the student, and he bad gone deeply 
into the memoirs of their respective periods, more especially, 
however, the French memoirs, with which he had an ac- 
quaintance that might have been envied by a professional 
historical student. He was especially interested in the prob- 
lems of the soul, and studied the metaphysicians and the 
modern psychologists, and was himself associated with so- 
cieties for psychical research, and personally engaged in the 
examination of spirit mediums, though never with satis- 
