Читать книгу The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream онлайн

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Leacraft now observed more closely the character of the convocation, and realized its composite and representative elements. Dr. M—, always himself immersed in the study of the lives, achievements and distinctions of the prominent men of the country, was an enthusiastic verbal cicerone through the maze of faces which seemed suddenly to have condensed into a really crowded audience. Here was Dr. D—, the Alaskan explorer in the early days of the nineteenth century, the world recognized authority on the tertiary fossils of the east and west coasts, and a man of erudition and delightful literary skill. Beyond him sat Dr. M—, a quiet-faced man, curator of the National Museum, author of text books, and gifted with a singularly shrewd thoughtfulness. At his side sat the sphinx-featured F—, of Chicago, a gentle-minded scholar, to whom the Heavens had entrusted the secrets of their meteoritic denizens, and who, by a more fortunate circumstance, held a pen of consummate grace. Again at his side was the Jupiter-browed Ward, an erratic over the face of the globe, possessed with a transcendant enthusiasm for the same celestial visitors that F— described, and chasing them with the zeal of a lynx in their most inaccessible quarries; a man of immense conviviality, and controlling the smouldering fires of a temper that defied reason or resistance. At the front of the rows of chairs, and not far from the cynosure of all eyes—the President—were two notable students of the past life of the globe, Professors O— and S—, men whose studies in that amazing storehouse of extinct life which the West held sealed in its clays and marls, limestones and sandstones, had continued on higher and more certain levels the work of Marsh and Leidy and Cope, and who had transcribed before the whole world, in monuments of scientific precision, the most startling confessions of the fossil dead. To one side, on the same row, sat Prof. B—, known in two continents, for chemical learning, especially on that side of chemistry which mingles insensibly with the laws of matter. And whispering in his ear, with sundry emphatic nods, sat, next to him, Dr. R—, of Washington, learned in the ways of men’s digestion, and the enigmas of food and the arts of food-makers. In the row behind, the expressive head of Young, aureoled with years and honors, was seen, and at his side the face of Newcomb, who had set the seal of his genius and industry across the patterned stars. Here was A— H—, the geologist, reticent and receptive, there C—, weighted with new responsibilities in furnishing time to the rapacious biologist, and in discovering new ways of making this old world. Behind them sat M—, wise beyond belief in bric-a-brac and brachiopods, vindictively assertive, and self-sacrificingly tender and kind. There was McG— and I—, W—, A—, V—, and B— W—, bringing to the speaker the homage of archæology, of petrology, of zoology, and morphology. In a group of motionless and eager attention were A—, the sage metereologist, beloved in two continents; B—, abstruse and difficult, meditative, as a man might be who kept his hand on the pulses of matter, and B—, skillful in weighing the atoms of the air, or probing the volcanoes of the moon. In one line, mingling in conversation that reached Leacraft’s ears as a strange jargon of conflicting sciences, were G—, H— and H—k. And beyond them, mute, as if by mutual repulsion, sat F—, the agile scrutinizer of Nature’s crystals; P—, holding in his labyrinthine memory the names of half a universe of shells, and B—n, to whom each plant of the wayside bowed in recognition of a master’s knowledge of itself. Against the wall, in a triad of sympathy, was A—, the surgeon; S—, the neurologist, and R—. And alone, in an isolation that belied his intense geniality, was K—.