He seemed to have no time to accumulate money. Fortunately, a fund of forty thousand dollars has been raised by friends, the income of which goes to his family during life, and afterwards to the National Academy of Sciences, to be devoted to original research. In character he was above reproach. He said, "I think that immorality and great mental power exercised in the discovery of scientific truths are incompatible with each other; and that more error is introduced from defect in moral sense than from want of intellectual capacity." He loved nature. "A life devoted exclusively to the study of a single insect," he said, "is not spent in vain. No animal, however insignificant, is isolated; it forms a part of the great system of nature, and is governed by the same general laws which control the most prominent beings of the organic world." In 1870, when gazing upon the Aar glacier, from the Rhone valley, he exclaimed to his daughter, while the tears coursed down his cheeks: "This is a place to die in. We should go no further." A really great man is never afraid to show that he has a tender heart. He loved his home. Out from it, in his early married life, two children went by death, and later, an only son in his early manhood. Three daughters were left him. One of them records in her diary: "Had father with us all the evening. I modelled his profile in clay, while he read 'Thomson's Seasons' to us. In the earlier part of the evening he seemed restless and depressed, but the influence of the poet drove away the cloud, and then an expression of almost childlike sweetness rested upon his lips, singularly in contrast, yet beautifully in harmony, with, the intellect of the brow above." Again she writes: "We were all up until a late hour, reading poetry with father and mother, father being the reader. He attempted 'Cowper's Grave,' by Mrs. Browning, but was too tender-hearted to finish the reading of it. We then laughed over the 'Address to the Mummy,' soared to heaven with Shelley's 'Skylark,' roamed the forest with Bryant, culled flowers from other poetical fields, and ended with 'Tam O'Shanter.' I took for my task to recite a part of the latter from memory, while father corrected, as if he were 'playing schoolmaster.'"