Such filial dedication must have been all the more precious to Lanfear because, about that time, it became evident that Archie would never carry on his father’s work.  He had begun brilliantly, you may remember, by a little paper on Limulus Polyphemus that attracted a good deal of notice when it appeared in the Central Blatt; but gradually his zoological ardour yielded to an absorbing passion for the violin, which was followed by a sudden plunge into physics.  At present, after a side-glance at the drama, I understand he’s devoting what is left of his father’s money to archaeological explorations in Asia Minor.

“Archie’s got a delightful little mind,” Lanfear used to say to me, rather wistfully, “but it’s just a highly polished surface held up to the show as it passes.  Dredge’s mind takes in only a bit at a time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern.  I saw just how it would be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a flash, and answer me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared into one of his fathomless silences, and then came to the surface like a dripping retriever, a long way beyond Archie’s objections, and with an answer to them in his mouth.”

It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear’s career came to him:  I mean, of course, John Weyman’s gift to Columbia of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection with it, of a chair of Experimental Evolution.  Weyman had always taken an interest in Lanfear’s work, but no one had supposed that his interest would express itself so magnificently.  The honour came to Lanfear at a time when he was fighting an accumulation of troubles:  failing health, the money difficulties resulting from his irrepressible generosity, his disappointment about Archie’s career, and perhaps also the persistent attacks of the new school of German zoologists.

“If I hadn’t Galen I should feel the game was up,” he said to me once, in a fit of half-real, half-mocking despondency.  “But he’ll do what I haven’t time to do myself, and what my boy can’t do for me.”

That meant that he would answer the critics, and triumphantly affirm Lanfear’s theory, which had been rudely shaken, but not displaced.

“A scientific hypothesis lasts till there’s something else to put in its place.  People who want to get across a river will use the old bridge till the new one’s built.  And I don’t see any one who’s particularly anxious, in this case, to take a contract for the new one,” Lanfear ended; and I remember answering with a laugh:  “Not while Horatius Dredge holds the other.”