THOMAS TRACY BOUVE: MEMORIAL MEETING. 223 
will be spoken of by those fully competent to appreciate and describe 
its high character. 
It was well recognized beyond this Society. He was a member of 
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 
An honorary member of several other Science Societies, and 
A member of the Council of the Boston Thursday Evening Club, 
which for fifty years has done so much to popularize science 
amongst 11 s. 
In 1850 Harvard University conferred upon him the honorary 
degree of Master of Arts. 
Mr. Bouve was a fine example of the amateur naturalist and 
what this class has done for the advance of science in this country. 
This Society was largely founded by such men, and for the first 
half of its existence they were its chief workers and patrons. 
What a roll of honor that list constitutes. Later it was converted 
into a high or normal school, and with the specialization of 
scientific study and larger development of professionalism, it ceased 
to be the delightful Natural History Club, in which the men of 
business and leisure, and the hard-working professional man 
found so much recreation, and our smaller community at large so 
great profit. Much and good work was done in those earlier days, 
too. Some who lived and labored in them look back upon them 
with a keen pang of regret. 
But the function of the amateur has not wholly died out. I 
visited this summer the country home of one of the oldest and most 
distinguished London surgeons. It lay among the beautiful Surrey 
hills, not far from classic Selborne, the abode of that prototype of 
the men I ask you to recall. There in Haslemere he had built a 
simple village museum, in which was preserved a specimen of every 
object of natural history collected by residents of the country round 
about, all arranged in an admirable manner. Every era of the 
world’s past history was there illustrated, from the dawn of creation, 
in a strikingly graphic way. Here, every Sunday afternoon this 
great physician and teacher of physicians met Ins neighbors of all 
ranks, the humblest peasant and England’s greatest poet, recently 
deceased, and spoke to them in his rare way of the works of the 
Creator. The whole population of that region has thus become 
actively interested in natural history, and its character elevated. It 
was delightful after a visit to the vast collections and magnificent 
