ILL-HEALTH. 



135 



mistake and should be left to others. Whether I should so 

 act myself under provocation is a different question." It was 

 a feeling partly dictated by instinctive delicacy, and partly 

 by a strong sense of the waste of time, energy, and temper 

 thus caused. He said that he owed his determination not to 

 get into discussions * to the advice of Lyell, — advice which 

 he transmitted to those among his friends who were given to 

 paper warfare. 



If the character of my father's working life is to be under- 

 stood, the conditions of ill-health, under which he worked, 

 must be constantly borne in mind. He bore his illness with 

 such uncomplaining patience, that even his children can 

 hardly, I believe, realise the extent of his habitual suffering. 

 In their case the difficulty is heightened by the fact that, 

 from the days of their earliest recollections, they saw him in 

 constant ill-health, — and saw him, in spite of it, full of pleas- 

 ure in what pleased them. Thus, in later life, their percep- 

 tion of what he endured had to be disentangled from the 

 impression produced in childhood by constant genial kind- 

 ness under conditions of unrecognised difficulty. No one 

 indeed, except my mother, knows the full amount of suffering 

 he endured, or the full amount of his wonderful patience. 

 For all the latter years of his life she never left him for a 

 night ; and her days were so planned that all his resting 

 hours might be shared with her. She shielded him from 

 every avoidable annoyance, and omitted nothing that might 

 save him trouble, or prevent him becoming overtired, or that 

 might alleviate the many discomforts of his ill-health. I hesi- 

 tate to speak thus freely of a thing so sacred as the life-long 



* He departed from his inile in his " Note on the Habits of the Pampas 

 "Woodpecker, Colaptes campesttis" ' Proc. Zool. Soc.,' 1S70, p. 705 : also in 

 a letter published in the 'Athenaeum' (1863, p. 554), in which case he 

 afterwards regretted that he had not remained silent. His replies to criti- 

 cisms, in the later editions of the ' Origin,' can hardly be classed as infrac- 

 tions of his rule. 



