WORK. 



123 



easily from side to side. His ordinary tools, &c., were lying 

 about on the table, but besides these a number of odds and 

 ends were kept in a round table full of radiating drawers, and 

 turning on a vertical axis, which stood close by his left side, 

 as he sat at his microscope-table. The drawers were labelled, 

 "best tools," "rough tools," "specimens," " preparations for 

 specimens," &c. The most marked peculiarity of the con- 

 tents of these drawers was the care with which little scraps 

 and almost useless things were preserved; he held the well- 

 known belief, that if you threw a 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 oddness. 



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 up something like what 

 he wanted and get it darkened inside with shoe-blacking ; 

 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 uselessly out on 

 one side. But so much of his experimenting was of a simple 

 kind, that he had no need for any elaboration, and I think 

 his habit in this respect was in great measure 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 



