104 



REMINISCENCES. 



sentence to a friend, a patriotic German lady, and used to 

 laugh at her if she did not translate it fluently. He himself 

 learnt German 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, 

 "Ah, 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 really difficult ones. He never 

 attempted 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 sciences 

 his doctrines make themselves felt so widely that there was 

 something interesting to him in most departments of it. 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 instance, 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. 



