ch. iv.] REMINISCENCES. 101 



mind almost better than perseverance. Perseverance seems 

 hardly to express his almost fierce desire to force the truth 

 to reveal itself. He often said that it was important that a 

 man should know the right point at which to give up an 

 inquiry. And I think it was his tendency to pass this point 

 that inclined him to apologise for his perseverance, and gave 

 the air of dogged ness to his work. 



He often said that no one could be a good observer un- 

 less he was an active theoriser. This brings me back to 

 what I said about his instinct for arresting exceptions : it 

 was as though he were charged with theorising power ready 

 to flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that 

 no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a stream of 

 theory, and thus the fact became magnified into importance. 

 In this way it naturally happened that many untenable the- 

 ories occurred to him ; but fortunately his richness of im- 

 agination was equalled by his power of judging and con- 

 demning the thoughts that occurred to him. He was just 

 to his theories, and did not condemn them unheard ; and so 

 it happened that he was willing to test what would seem to 

 most people not at all worth testing. These rather wild 

 trials he called " fool's experiments," and enjoyed extremely. 

 As an example I may mention that finding the seed-leaves 

 of a kind of sensitive plant, to be highly sensitive to vibra- 

 tions of the table, he fancied that they might perceive the 

 vibrations of sound, and therefore made me play my bassoon 

 close to a plant.* 



The love of experiment was very strong in him, and I 

 can remember the way he would say, " I shan't be easy till I 

 have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He 

 enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only 

 entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his 

 books which required argument and the marshalling of 

 facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday. 

 Thus, while working upon the Variations of Animals and 

 Plants in 1860-61, he made out the fertilisation of Orchids, 

 and thought himself idle for giving so much time to them. 

 It is interesting to think that so important a piece of re- 

 search should have been undertaken and largely worked out 

 as a pastime in place of more serious work. The letters to 

 Hooker of this period contain expressions such as, " God 



* This is not so much an example of superabundant theorising from a small 

 cause as of his wish to test the most improbable ideas. 



