deal of the people and the country of my origin. Despite my 

 undiluted English blood and early upbringing, I found myself 

 resentful of criticism of South Africa, especially of comments on 

 Smuts I heard in quite high circles. I became conscious for the 

 first time of being a 'South African', and those from my own 

 country I met over there were no longer 'English' or 'Afrikaans', 

 but my own people. The childhood-fostered gap between 'Briton' 

 and 'Boer' in my mind just closed up. 



On my return to South Africa in 1923 I took an appointment 

 at Rhodes University College, where I taught chemistry, a subject 

 I loved as much as ever, and managed to find time for research, 

 publishing a series of papers. 



My father was fond of angling, and as a very small boy, with 

 some of his cast-off gear, I vividly remember catching my first 

 'Dassie', a Bream-like fish, at Knysna. This wonderful shining 

 thing I had pulled up from the unknown world below the water 

 had a terrific effect on me, probably more than anything ever 

 since. From then on angling has been a passion, a madness, some- 

 times even a reproach. In South Africa in my young days 'fishing', 

 sea fishing, was rather frowned upon as a pastime for a member 

 of a University staff. It is strange to look back on it now, when 

 even the greatest are proud to display their catches. I had soon 

 got to know all the common kinds of fishes, but as I attained man- 

 hood wanted to know more and found great difficulty in identi- 

 fying strange types, and there were many. No one could help me, 

 and the only books available were beyond easy use. The 'keys' 

 were intelligible only to those already so expert as not to need 

 them, so that it was a fearful job trying to identify unknown fishes. 



I struggled on alone, baffled, but eventually worked out a 

 numerical system for identifying fishes. It took all my spare time 

 for more than a year, and its compilation involved the writing of 

 more than a million figures, but it worked. It enabled me to 

 track in a few minutes quite unknown fishes, and even to identify 

 them from mere fragments. This was a tremendous step forward, 

 and gave me power that normally comes only from much longer 

 experience. 



Having mastered the fishes that came from angling, I went on 

 to collect others systematically on the Eastern Province coast, 

 discovering to my astonishment that I was the first to do this. 



