Professor Harvey Washington Wiley, the chemist of the Department of Agriculture, recently went to a Washington store for the purpose of purchasing a fountain pen. The obliging young man at the counter furnished the professor with a sheet of paper, a bottle of ink and several fountain pens, so that might try each kind.

In doing so, the professor soon covered the sheet with "tempus fugit" The clerk looking on the while with kindly interest said, "If you should buy one and it doesn't suit you, Mr. Fugit, you may return it for another.

From Cambridge Jeffersonian September 13th, 1906

Explanation for those who did not get the joke:
"Tempus Fugit" is the Latin phrase which means "Time Flies" The clerk mistakingly thought this was Wiley's name.

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The US Agiculture Department offers a biography for Professor Wiley:

Harvey Washington Wiley was born in a log farmhouse in Indiana, in 1844. A top graduate of Hanover College (1867), Wiley then studied at Indiana Medical College where he received his M.D. in 1871. After he graduated, Wiley accepted a position teaching chemistry at the medical college, where he taught Indiana's first laboratory course in chemistry beginning in 1873. Following a brief interlude at Harvard, where he was awarded a B.S. degree after only a few months of intense effort, he accepted a faculty position in chemistry at the newly opened Purdue University in 1874. In 1878, Wiley travelled overseas where he attended the lectures of August Wilhelm von Hoffman the celebrated German discoverer of several organic tar derivatives, including analine. While in Germany, Wiley was elected to the prestigious German Chemical Society founded by Hoffman. Wiley spent most of his time in the Imperial Food Laboratory in Bismarck working with Eugene Sell, mastering the use of the polariscope and studying sugar chemistry. Upon his return to Purdue, Wiley was asked by the Indiana State Board of Health to analyze the sugars and syrups on sale in the state to detect any adulteration. He spent his last years at Purdue studying sorghum culture and sugar chemistry, hoping, as did others, to help the United States develop a strong domestic sugar industry. His first published paper in 1881 discussed the adulteration of sugar with glucose.