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Sriyanie
Miththapala ’88
Miss Horner and I kept in
touch long after I left Smith in 1988. Every six months or
so, an airmail letter would arrive at my home in Colombo,
Sri Lanka. Each letter was several pages long and covered
with small, neat cursive. Each contained a wealth of detail
about what she was doing at the time: publishing papers on
Peromyscus, attending annual mammal meetings wherever they
were held, and continuing her research. Sometimes they contained
paper or journal cuttings about my original area of research—big
cats.
Then one Christmas, I nearly
fell off my chair with amazement to read that Miss Horner,
at 80-something years old, had gone on a grueling field
trip with a group of other researchers to Costa Rica. The
reason, she wrote, was that “there was so much to learn.”
This statement, to me, epitomizes Miss Horner. She had an insatiable thirst
for knowledge and a child-like delight in discovery. It is this eagerness
and enjoyment that she conveyed to the many students of her teaching career.
Now firmly into middle age, I hope that I too can retain the love of learning
well into old age as she did, and convey it to my students and younger researchers
as she did, for this is the legacy Miss Horner has left to Smith through
generations of her students. |
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