first seemed so incredible and improbable.” In the chapter on “Woodnotes” in “Happy Hunting Grounds” Gibson describes the incident which was mentioned by Dr. Raymond at his funeral. He was once standing in line with many others at the polls in a voting-place in Brooklyn, when a dove flew down and into the room, and came straight to him, alighting upon his shoulder. No one in the place knew anything about the bird, or had ever seen it before. No one could see why it should have chosen him over all others in the group of voters. Possibly Mr. Gibson’s own explanation will have to answer. In his note of the incident he says, “I remarked to the bystanders, ‘That bird knows a good Republican when he sees one.’” Others also recall the incident of Dr. Abbott’s visit to Washington, when Mr. Gibson pointed out a bird in a near-by tree and began to describe its peculiar markings. Soon he rose impulsively, went up to the tree, reached out for the bird, and took the little creature in his hand, without its appearing in the least alarmed or hurt. Then, when he had finished his description and thus illustrated it from life, he replaced his specimen in the tree, whence it flew away. He certainly seemed to have that about him which made even the birds feel that he loved them and meant them no harm. His crowning work as a naturalist was done in the lectures upon the cross-fertilization of plants which fascinated so many audiences with the novel story of one of nature’s most amazing manifestations of adaptation and of resource. For years he had been a careful student of Sprengel, Darwin, and Müller, whose experiments and studies he supplemented with careful observations of his own, upon the relations of plant-and insect-life. He accumulated a mass of studies and of notes. He brooded over this theme for years. And at last, driven to utterance, he prepared himself, as few men are able to, for a series of lectures, illustrated with charts of his own invention and his own making. The machinery of these lectures was a superb test of his triple powers as naturalist, as artist, as writer. They were based on a solid and accurate knowledge of natural history. They were illustrated by a master hand in mechanical technique, reinforced by an artist’s skill in drawing and in color. They were set forth in a text which was clear, vivacious, and forceful. They constituted one of the most delightful and popular courses ever given before the American public. His own account of the origin of these lectures is most interesting. He had been in the habit of giving informal talks and lectures upon natural history in his summer home at Washington, illustrating them by rapid sketches on the blackboard. “When I came,” he said, “to touch upon the topic of inter-association and inter-communion of insects and flowers, especially the mechanism of flowers, their movements and forms, I found that I was handicapped, as many other scientists had been, by the difficulty of