ch. iv.] REMINISCENCES. 99 



thing away you were sure to want it directly and so things 

 accumulated. 



If any one had looked at his tools, &c, lying on the 

 table, he would have been struck by an air of simpleness, 

 make-shift, and oddity. 



At his right hand were shelves, with a number of other 

 odds and ends, glasses, saucers, tin biscuit boxes for germi- 

 nating seeds, zinc labels, saucers full of sand, &c, &c. Con- 

 sidering how tidy and methodical he was in essential things, 

 it is curious that he bore with so many make-shifts : for in- 

 stance, instead of having a box made of a desired shape, 

 and stained black inside, he would hunt ujo something like 

 what he wanted and get it darkened inside with shoe-black- 

 ing ; he did not care to have glass covers made for tumblers 

 in which he germinated seeds, but used broken bits of 

 irregular shape, with perhaps a narrow angle sticking use- 

 lessly out on one side. But so much of his experimenting 

 was of a simple kind, that he had no need for any elabora- 

 tion, and I think his habit in this respect was in great meas- 

 ure due to his desire to husband his strength and not waste 

 it on inessential things. 



His way of marking objects may here be mentioned. If 

 he had a number of things to distinguish, such as leaves, 

 flowers, &c, he tied threads of different colours round them. 

 In particular he used this method when he had only two 

 classes of objects to distinguish ; thus in the case of crossed 

 and self-fertilised flowers, one set would be marked with 

 black and one with white thread, tied round the stalk of the 

 flower. I remember well the look of two sets of capsules, 

 gathered and waiting to be weighed, counted, &c, with 

 pieces of black and of white thread to distinguish the trays 

 in which they lay. When he had to compare two sets of 

 seedlings, sowed in the same pot, he separated them by a 

 partition of zinc-plate ; and the zinc-label, which gave the 

 necessary details about the experiment, was always placed 

 on a certain side, so that it became instinctive with him to 

 know without reading the label which, were the " crossed " 

 and which the " self-fertilised." 



His love of each particular experiment, and his eager 

 zeal not to lose the fruit of it, came out markedly in these 

 crossing experiments in the elaborate care he took not to 

 make any confusion in putting capsules into wrong trays, 

 &c, &c. I can recall his appearance as he counted seeds 

 under the simple microscope with an alertness not usually 



