84: REMINISCENCES. [ch. iv. 



Hildebraud of Freiburg for writing German which was as 

 clear as French. He sometimes gave a German sentence to 

 a friend, a patriotic German lady, and used to laugh at her 

 if she did not translate it fluently. He himself learnt Ger- 

 man simply by hammering away with a dictionary ; he 

 would say that his only way was to read a sentence a great 

 many times over, and at last the meaning occurred to him. 

 "When he began German long ago, he boasted of the fact 

 (as he used to tell) to Sir J. Hooker, who replied, " xVh, my 

 dear fellow, that's nothing ; I've begun it many times." 



In spite of his want of grammar, he managed to get on 

 wonderfully with German, and the sentences that he failed 

 to make out were generally difficult ones. He never at- 

 tempted to speak German correctly, but pronounced the 

 words as though they were English ; and this made it not a 

 little difficult to help him when he read out a German sen- 

 tence and asked for a translation. He certainly had a bad 

 ear for vocal sounds, so that he found it impossible to per- 

 ceive small differences in pronunciation. 



His wide interest in branches of science that were not 

 specially his own was remarkable. In the biological sci- 

 ences his doctrines make themselves felt so widely that 

 there was something interesting to him in most depart- 

 ments. He read a good deal of many quite special works, 

 and large parts of text books, such as Huxley's Invertebrate 

 Anatomy, or such a book as Balfour's Embryology, where 

 the detail, at any rate, was not specially in his own line. 

 And in the case of elaborate books of the monograph 

 type, though he did not make a study of them, yet he felt 

 the strongest admiration for them. 



In the non-biological sciences he felt keen sympathy 

 with work of which he could not really judge. For in- 

 stance, he used to read nearly the whole of Nature, though 

 so much of it deals with mathematics and physics. I have 

 often heard him say that he got a kind of satisfaction in 

 reading articles which (according to himself) he could not 

 understand. I wish I could reproduce the manner in which 

 he would laugh at himself for it. 



It was remarkable, too, how he kept up his interest in 

 subjects at which he had formerly worked. This was strik- 

 ingly the case with geology. In one of his letters to Mr. 

 Judd he begs him to pay him a visit, saying that since 

 LyelPs death he hardly ever gets a geological talk. His ob- 

 servations, made only a few years before his death, on the 



