ABSTRACT
Imay be allowed today by general custom to talk more about myself than would be thought becoming at another time; if this shocks you, I can give you the consolation that it will not happen again.
Exactly a hundred years ago Charles Lamb said goodbye to the India House where he had served just as many years as I have done at the university. On his way home he looked in at his friend Crabb Robinson’s dwelling in the Temple and dropped a note in his letterbox: “I have left the damned India House for ever! Give me great joy”
My feelings towards the institution I leave are not the same as Lamb’s. I cherish deep gratitude to our university when I think of my undergraduate days and of my time as a professor, and I shall certainly miss not only my joint-work with my colleagues but especially my constantly rejuvenating ties with young students. But let me now cast a backward glance over my life to show how happily my own scientific life shaped itself. In spite of an apparently zigzag course by way of law, chess, shorthand, French literature and Danish dialects, the way from my first independent studies to my present-day interests has run tolerably straight.
