Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/364

332 instead of zoölogy, under Vogt, he appeared to be really pleased, and expressed himself freely on the advantage of being guided by so eminent an authority and so liberal a thinker as was the self-imposed exile of the University of Geneva. And in truth it must be admitted that there was much in Vogt that reminded me of Huxley. Like the latter, he was fearlessly outspoken in his utterances. Witness his tirade against the late Emperor William of Germany, delivered as a protest against the expenditure of the state's money on bronze and iron cannon when it could have been more humanely and profitably used in the purchase of the then recently discovered second specimen of Aarchæopteryx—that strange fossil hybrid connecting bird and reptile which has since found its way to the Berlin Museum. Like his English prototype, Vogt was also an admirable lecturer, fluent in diction and facile with the crayon, but it can hardly be claimed that either the quality or the tone of his lectures was fully representative of the scholarship of their author.

Vogt never allowed the opportunity of a pun to escape him, and his bons mots were at times hardly more elegant than they were appropriate; but, for all that, he was very popular, and equally so with the few women students of his class as with the men. He spoke in French with a decided German intonation, frequently relieving himself of a sigh brought about by an uncomfortably asthmatic condition. His powerful bodily frame, disproportionably shortened through a generous development of tissue about the equatorial region, was in marked contrast to the tall and nearly upright carriage of Prof. Huxley, whose slightly stooping head and shoulders reduced somewhat what might otherwise have been considered a more than average height. Huxley never entered the class lecture room except in a dress in which he was immediately prepared to go to the street; Vogt rarely appeared without a coat which did not in one or more places show visible signs of underlying shirt sleeves. The presence of women in no way affected his Wohlgefühl, and in truth it must be said that this class of students was to him in a measure a blank, as he invariably addressed the class only as "Messieurs."

Among the many warm friends and admirers that Huxley numbered within the ranks of the scientific fraternity there was none who was more enthusiastic in his admiration of the great man than the distinguished comparative anatomist of the Royal College of Surgeons, the late Prof. Kitchen Parker. An afternoon and evening spent at the home of this most genial and alloverflowing host serves my memory as the record of one of the pleasantest incidents of my student life in London. Huxley and Parker had not many years before announced their new classification of birds—worked out conjointly on characters founded