SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY. 
25 
father, who was a merchant. This difficulty he attempted 
to hide as far as possible, producing upon the average man 
the conviction that he was dealing with a very haughty and 
distant individual, a deduction which was very far from the 
truth. 
Living here without family ties, coming in his fifty-third 
year, almost after the period when men make close friend- 
ships, his hunger for real friendship and affection was 
pathetic. Most of the men with whom he came into contact 
were of another generation, and it was a genuine revelation 
to see him, as I sometimes did, with a friend of his youth, a 
man of his own age whom he had known for many years. 
He was a most rigidly truthful man — not truthful in any 
ordinary sense, but in that extraordinary Puritan, New Eng- 
land sense, which did not even permit him to subscribe him- 
self as being “very sincerely yours” if he was not. 
I have alluded above to the fact that he himself ascribed 
his interest in aerial navigation to a childish wonder as to 
how the great heavy birds which he used to watch in a New 
England pasture could fly and maintain themselves in the 
air, and in another place he has told us that his work on the 
sun also grew out of a childish interest in this great center 
of our system, upon which life on this planet depends. I 
think that these two ideas of his were not fancies, but that 
it was a fact that in his case especially the child was father 
to the man. One of his favorite quotations was the initial 
stanzas of the poem of Wordsworth: 
“ Who is the happy warrior? Who is he 
That every man in arms should wish to be? 
It is the generous spirit, who, when brought 
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought 
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought.” 
But this memorial, inadequate as it may be, must draw 
to a close. I have been able to faintly trace the lines of a, 
great mind and a great soul, one that left a powerful impress 
upon the knowledge and thinking of the country in which 
he was born and the time in which he lived, and his name 
4— Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 15. 
