s to observe
how varied and how utterly different maybe the non-essentials, moral
and mental, of the beings to whom God has given the rare gift of power
to look into the secrets He has scattered around us in plant and earth
and animal life. Consistently with various grades of competence for
investigation, the man may be social, or may flee his fellows; may be
witty, or incapable of seeing the broadest fun; a poet, or almost
devoid of creative imagination; full of refinement and rife with
multiple forms of culture, or neither scholarly nor well-informed
outside of his especial line of work. According as he is endowed with
mental graces and forms of culture, apart from his science, will be
his charm as a companion; but while the absence of these means of
pleasing is sometimes met with, and while their lack in no wise
lessens his power of investigation, I have found most men of science
to possess in a high degree qualities which rendered them delightful
as comrades at the camp-fire or as guests at the dinner-table. Indeed,
the best talkers I know are men of science--not the mere students of a
knowledge already garnered, but those who discover new facts or who
spend their lives in original research. The most mirthful, cheery,
happy and liberal-minded of men are to be found in the limited ring of
those who are known in this country as investigators. On the European
continent the same remark holds true, but in Europe this class is very
often less refined than with us. In England the same class is
undoubtedly notable for a curious absence of the wide range of general
information constantly found in America, so that English men of
science often amaze us in social life by their lack not so much of
culture, as of wide knowledge of matters outside of their own studies,
as well as by their inaptitude to share the lighter chat of the
dinner-table.

Even in Great Britain--and yet more in Germany and France--the habits
of life make it less of a sacrifice than here for men to abandon all
that money gives and to devote themselves to the quiet life of the
closet and the laboratory. Once set in a groove, the average man
abroad is less apt, to seek to rise out of it or depart from it; while
with us the constant flow of a too intensely active life is for ever
luring men with baits of greed to take the easy step aside from pure
science into the golden ways of gain. Honored be they in this land of
eager money-getting who withstand the tempta