John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[499] all for their principles without thinking of any selfish return for themselves.

Honor to the memory of Jose Marti, and peace to his manly and generous soul!

And when a man who could write thus of a fallen hero at the beginning of a struggle, before victory had come to hallow his name, should himself pass away, little wonder is it that the Cuban leaders in the persons of Palma, Quesada, and others should be the first to lay a wreath upon his tomb, and to testify the gratitude of a struggling people for his unselfish and sympathetic devotion to their cause.

While giving to his profession always his first and most faithful attention, he had a wide range of talents and interests outside of his daily occupation. It has been mentioned more than once that he had a great gift for language, which he rightly regarded as the depository of man's inner and spiritual history. In studying words, he followed them through all their forms and mutations to their ultimate meaning, and in this found never-ending pleasure and instruction. One of his learned contemporaries having read him a lecture for using the word “scrimmage” instead of “skirmish” in the columns of the Sun, he overwhelmed his would-be teacher by a witty paragraph in which he set forth a few of the many transmutations through which the word had gone from the Middle Ages to the present time. He showed beyond question that “scrimmage” was not only well established by immemorial usage, but was one of the breeziest and most suggestive forms ever used to convey a meaning perfectly at home in every modern European tongue.

The fact is that there were few men of his time not wholly devoted to the higher branches of study who better deserved to be called scholarly than Dana. He was always