These early reunions were informal, but as years rolled on a pleasant custom crystallized into an established usage, the same friends meeting, week after week, in Dr. Wistar’s house, at the southwest corner of Fourth and Prune Streets, whose beautiful garden extended to St. Mary’s church-yard. The entertainment was simple, as the host’s idea was an intellectual rather than a convivial gathering. Tea, coffee, and other light refreshments were offered to the guests; ice-creams, raisins, and almonds were later added to the regale. Even then the name of Sybarite could not be applied to those early convives: the terrapin and oyster decadence was of much later date. A table was seldom spread. The number of guests varied from ten to fifty, but usually included between fifteen and twenty-five persons. The invitations were commenced in October or November, and continued to March or April. During this period Dr. Wistar welcomed to his home, each week, his old friends and colleagues, and any strangers whom they chose to bring with them. In 1804 Dr. Wistar issued an invitation to his friends to meet Baron von Humboldt, the great naturalist, and his young friend the botanist Bonpland, who stopped in Philadelphia on their return from a scientific expedition through Mexico and the West Indies. Here also was introduced the latest sensation, in the form of Captain Riley, long a prisoner among the Arabs; also the learned and eccentric Dr. Mitchill, first Surgeon-General of New York, later satirized by Halleck and Drake in “The Croakers:” “We hail thee!--mammoth of the State, Steam frigate on the waves of physic, Equal in practice or debate To cure the nation or the phthisic!” Dr. Hosack, of the same city, who was present at the fatal duel between Hamilton and Burr, was another early guest; while under the formal organization of 1818, and in a time nearer our own, England’s most brilliant novelist recalls an evening spent at what he is pleased to call a “Whister party.” It is not strange that Philadelphians were glad to take the guests of the city to these parties, where was gathered together, both in the last century and in this, the best that our New World civilization could produce, whether of talent and learning or of courtly grace and good breeding, and here down all the varied years has flashed that genial flow of wit without which no social gathering is complete. Here, in early days, came the learned and witty Abbé Correa de Serra, Mr. Samuel Breck, of Boston, and Dr. John W. Francis, of New York, whose wit and social qualities were said to resemble those of the much-loved Lamb; and later came Robert Walsh and Joseph Hopkinson, both distinguished for their brilliant colloquial abilities, while Nicholas Biddle would save for the learned brotherhood his freshest _bon mot_, and Dr. Nathaniel Chapman would bring hither his most irresistible witticism.