THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 51 



middle of the book, wasted over footling love affairs, when the hero might 

 have had at least one more hair-raising adventure in the forests of Brazil, the 

 Indian Jungle, the African veldt, or wherever it happened to be." 



At sixteen I had outgrown these boys' books and was ripe for more sub- 

 stantial reading. It so happened, too, that in the previous term I had heard 

 quite a lot about Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. It formed a subject 

 of discussion among schoolmates on the Science side, who were actually divided 

 into two rival camps under the leadership of this master and that, known to 

 favour or to scout the doctrine; a special hero of my schoolboy worship, some 

 years my senior and a prefect in the house where I spent my first few months of 

 attendance at Dulwich College, had recently paid me a visit from Guy's Hospital 

 in his first year as a medical student, and from him I learned some outlines of 

 the theory; it had even been debated in my hearing at home by an elder brother 

 in conversation with a business friend; and so it came about that the idea of 

 Evolution figured quite prominently in the almost daily thoughts of a classical 

 student of sixteen; and it was in answer to a question of mine that the good 

 doctor first broached the subject and explained to his young guest as clearly 

 and simply as might be the nature and trend of that world-revolutionizing 

 treatise, Darwin's "Origin of Species." 



And in a very few days, as it seemed, the solitary boy of sixteen with his 

 time-old mystery of life, found sympathy and help as well as companionship 

 in his host of nearly sixty. The doctor was very methodical and kept a series 

 of logbooks or diaries in which he entered a summary of everything he read, 

 •even to magazine articles; these notebooks he called his "omnium gatherums." 

 He had not a large library, as most of his reading was done by way of periodic 

 parcels of books from Edinburgh, kept for two or three months and then ex- 

 changed. But he had a little bookcase of favorites, and after suggesting some 

 volumes to be read in a certain order, he gave me the run of the shelves. I first 

 read round the theory in three or four books like Robert Chambers' "Vestiges 

 of Natural Creation," Lauder Brunton's "Bible and Science," and Samuel 

 Laing's "Modern Science and Modern Thought;" I was then made to tackle, 

 just as soon as I seemed ripe for it, Darwin's "Origin of Species" and "Descent 

 of Man;" and after these came a troop of his great exponents, Huxley, Wallace, 

 Romanes, Grant Allen, and Lubbock. When once I had assimilated sorne of 

 this thought, I was promoted from the Doctor's exposition to the give-and- 

 take boxing bouts of argument and discussion. Long before I passed from 

 school to the university, I was as thorough-going a Darwinian as the old doctor 

 himself and even more advanced, partly from the natural insolence of youth, 

 and partly from wide reading in the noblest literature of all ages and lands, the 

 fearless freedom of Greek poet and philosopher. 



Together as men and equals we read and discussed Weismann and Haeckel, 

 or shook our heads sadly over the unsoundness of Wallace's closing chapters 

 on "Darwinism" with their ''dens ex machina" of Spiritualism. When Huxley 

 tilted with the clericals in the pages of the XlXth Century Magazine, we both 

 keenly admired the skill with which he found the joints of the mediaeval armour 

 and unhorsed his cumbrous opponents; a "bonny fechter," like Alan Breck, 

 Avas that brilliant pamphleteer, and a tower of strength to the good cause, as 

 we viewed it, of untrammelled thought — the march of Science. LTnlike the 



