166 NATURAL SCIENCE. March. 



took away all their sting'. I was once saying what an edifying 

 sight it must have been to see him showing Cardinal Manning round 

 the rooms a tone of the Royal Society's conversazioni. "Oh! yes," 

 he said ; " the Archbishop and I are great friends ; he'd burn me if he 

 could, and I'm sure I'd knock all his fraternity on the head." But 

 the twinkle in the deep-set grey eyes deprived this truly mediaeval 

 speech of all actuality. 



Indeed, no one who came much into contact with him could fail 

 to see that beneath all his prejudices and all his pugnacity was con- 

 cealed — and not very deeply concealed either — a singularly tender and 

 lovable nature. One of my earliest recollections of him is in con- 

 nection with a letter he wrote to my father on the occasion of the 

 death, in infancy, of one of my brothers. " Why," he wrote, " did you 

 not tell us before that the child was named after me, that we might 

 have made his short life happier by a toy or two ? " I never saw a 

 man more crushed than he was during the dangerous illness of one of 

 his daughters, and he told me that, having then to make an after- 

 dinner speech, he broke down for the first time in his life, and for one 

 painful moment forgot where he was and what he had to say. I can 

 truly say that I never knew a man whose way of speaking of his 

 family or whose manner in his own home was fuller of a noble, loving, 

 and withal playful courtesy. 



It has been remarked that great fighters, when they retire from 

 active life, usually take to gardening, and this was true of the most 

 brilliant of Darwin's lieutenants, who "sharpened his beak and claws" 

 to such excellent effect in the great fight which followed the publication 

 of the " Origin of Species." He wrote to me not very long ago, " I 

 begin to think with Candide that ' cultivons notre jardin ' comprises 

 the whole duty of man." No one — at least no man of science — could 

 help regretting that he retired from active scientific work so early, and 

 he evidently had something of the same feeling himself. In the letter 

 from which I have just quoted he says: "Looking back from the aged 

 point of view, the life which cost so much wear and tear in the living 

 seems to have effected very little." But the explanation is not far to 

 seek. Apart from ill-health (" some years of continued ill-health . . . 

 have driven me quite out of touch with science, and, indeed, except 

 for a certain toughness of constitution, I should have been driven out 

 of touch with terrestrial things altogether "), he was a man of such 

 wide interests that he could never reasonably have been expected to 

 be wholly devoted to natural science. Religion, politics, psychology, 

 social problems, all that men think of deeply and strive for earnestly, 

 were profoundly interesting to him, and it is hardly to be wondered 

 at that, when he retired from professional work, these things were 

 more to him than the phylogeny of the Mollusca or the last new 

 notochord. Moreover, it must be remembered that he was not, like 

 Darwin, a born naturalist, but a man of all-round capacity, who 

 drifted into biological work by the mere force of circumstances. If 



