Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways.  He was a trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the most various branches of natural science.  At another class dinner, when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the roof of the Museum of Comparative Zooelogy the trees of Cambridge, the masses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special beauty.  I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of Charles, before the British Association, emphasising the idea that the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree.  Plants may have memory, perhaps show passion, predatory instincts, or rudimentary intelligence.  The plant-world is therefore part and parcel of animated nature.  Agassiz announced with real fervour his adherence to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support.  Subtle links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to investigation.  In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of development.  There was a brotherhood between man and not only the zooephyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from the azoic rock on which it hangs.

As he talked I thought of the ample spaces of his Museum where the whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man, then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and plants counterfeited in glass continuing the line unbroken, down to the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it clings.

My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science, and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch.  In the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my classmate in a remote part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss friends.  I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming from his place he sought me out.  “I heard your voice,” he said, “and knew you were here before I saw you.”  We chatted genially.  That day, he said, he had visited the site of his father’s hut on the Aar glacier, where the observations were made on which was based the glacial theory.  On that visit he had, as a small boy, been carried up in a basket on the back of a guide.  He had not been there since until that day.  He was that night in the environment into which he had been born, and assumed toward me the attitude of a host making at home a stranger guest.  To my question as to how a transient passer like myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, “Climb