While living at Washington, the first faint warnings of the final tragedy of his life began to declare themselves; a slight stiffness of the fingers after writing, followed later by a distinct writer's cramp. On his return to Brookline, as the stiffness of his muscles increased, a disease thought to have been due to a shot-gun accident in his youth, his hours at the Museum became shorter and shorter. At length he was forced to abandon his work, and finally was for years confined helplessly to a chair.

Henry Bowditch said of him: 'I remember, when a young man, looking around among the men of my generation and considering whose lot in life seemed to me, on the whole, the most enviable. I came to the conclusion that Theodore Lyman was, of all my acquaintances, the man for whom the future seemed to hold out the brightest promise.

'In vigorous health, with a personality — physical, mental, and moral-which endeared him to all who came in contact with him, happily married, with instincts and powers which led him to the highest callings, to the service of his country in the field and in legislative halls, with tastes for the study of the natural sciences and abundant means to gratify them, there seemed to be nothing lacking to make his life an ideally happy one.

"Then, when the shadow of a slow, insidious disease fell upon him, it seemed for a time as if his life were but to afford another illustration of the old Greek saying that no man is to be judged happy before his death; but when I saw how bravely he met the advances of his enemy, and with what courageous cheerfulness he interested himself in the pursuits of his friends and in the active life around him in which he could no longer share, I could not help feeling that a happiness was reserved for him higher than any of which the Greek philosopher had dreamed or I, as a young man, had formed a conception - the happiness of knowing that by the force of his example he had helped to raise those who came under its influence to a higher and nobler life.'

Cheerful and uncomplaining to the end, and tenderly cared for by his devoted wife, he went down at last with his flag nailed to the mast, and died as he had lived, a very gallant gentleman.

G. R. AGASSIZ

WILLIAM JAMES'

1842-1910

THE elder Henry James moved from Albany to New York while William was a little boy. The son's first schooling was in that city, but, as he was changing into a youth, with Harry following close behind, the devoted father, remembering the narrow compound of crude theology, well-meant discipline, and raw Americanism which had confined his adolescence, felt that a transplantation of these fair young shoots must be tried in a soil and atmosphere richer in associations, submitted to a riper culture. So when William was perhaps fourteen the family took ship for Europe. Presumably they stayed in England for a time, and travelled on the Continent before they placed the two older boys; then William began his studies in the Academy at Geneva, and, after a time, Harry, strangely misplaced and miserable in a preparatory scientific school, was allowed to join him.

The shy and admiring younger brother told in later years of his joy in seeing how easily William adapted himself to student life, even to their convivial society meetings, 'and to what happy and fruitful effect.' And he goes on:- 'What was not indeed, I always asked myself, the right work for him, or the right thing of any kind, that he took up or looked at or played with? — failing, as I did more than ever at the time I speak of, of the least glimpse of his being below an occasion. Whatever he played with, or worked at, entered at once into his intelligence, his talk, his humor, as with the action of coloring-matter dropped into water or that of the turning-on of a light within a window. Occasions waited on him, had always done so, to my view; and there he was, that springtime, on a level with them all; the effect of which recognition had much, had more than aught else, to say to the charming silver haze just then wrapped about everything of which I was conscious.'

And now, in their fifth year abroad, William wrote to his father

Since Dr. Emerson wrote this memoir, the Letters of William James, edited by his son Henry, have been published in two volumes (Boston, 1920).