Next to the new Ambassador, I suppose that President J.
B. Conant, of Harvard, is the most distinguished American now on an official mission to this country. President Conant, who is one of the leading chemists in the United States, and who is to establish an American office in London to co-ordinate British and American research in the chemical side of war-work, looks incredibly young for the position he fills and the role he plays. He is actually, I believe, 49. After having been presented with an honorary degree at Cambridge last Friday he was entertained to luncheon in the unique combination- room at St. John's at one of the happiest functions of the kind that I have attended for some time. There were only two speeches, one by the Vice-Chancellor, Dr. E. A. Benians, and one by President Conant, each quite admirable in its way. The Vice-Chancellor, with considerable dexterity, worked in a reference to a seventeenth-century Master of St. John's, who, when reproached with basing his appointments rather on the candidates' scholarship than on their godliness, made the convincing defence that " they may deceive me about their god- liness ; they can't about their scholarship."
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