who never seem to affiliate at all with the others; but in the long-run,
here as elsewhere, kindred spirits find one another out; and even the
unsocial ones take their share, whether or no, in the indefinable but
very sensible influence of massed numbers. Presently some one suggests
to the new-comer that he join some of the others of a Wednesday or
Saturday evening, at a rendezvous where a number of them meet regularly.
He goes, under escort of his sponsor, and is guided through one of those
narrow, dark, hill-side streets of Naples where he would hardly feel
secure to go alone, to a little wine-shop in what seems a veritable
dungeon--a place which, if a stranger in Naples, he would never even
remotely think of entering. But there he finds his confreres of the
laboratory gathered about a long table, with the most conglomerate
groups of Neapolitans of a seemingly doubtful class at their elbows.
Each biologist has a caraffa of light wine on the table before him,
and all are smoking. And, staid men of science that they are, they are
chattering away on trivial topics with the animation of a company of
school-boys. The stock language is probably German, for this bohemian
gathering is essentially a German institution; but the Germans are
polyglots, and you will hardly find yourself lost in their company,
whatever your native tongue.

Your companions will tell you that for years the laboratory fraternity
have met twice a week at this homely but hospitable establishment. The
host, honest Dominico Vincenzo Bifulco, will gladly corroborate the
statement by bringing out for inspection a great blank-book in which
successive companies of his guests from the laboratory have scrawled
their names, written epigrams, or made clever sketches. That book will
some day be treasured in the library of a bibliophile, but that will not
be until Bifulco is dead, for while he lives he will never part with it.

One comes to look upon this bohemian wine-shop as an adjunct of the
laboratory, and to feel that the free-and-easy meetings there are
in their way as important for the progress of science as the private
seances of the individual workers in the laboratory itself. Not because
scientific topics are discussed here, though doubtless that sometimes
happens, but because of that vitalizing influence of the contact of
kindred spirits of which I am speaking, and because this is the one
place where a considerable number of the workers at the laborato