A REMINISCENCE. 135 



a strong sense of friendship. He was a friend of friends, and it is 

 safe to say we shall not see his like again ; the writer ever thinks of 

 him with feelings of great endearment. Most of us will feel the 

 poorer by his withdrawal, the richer by the effect of his character and 

 devoted service. 



His death makes a gap in the ranks of the few distinguished men 

 of science we still possess in England, and the importance of his 

 loss from a national point of view, will perhaps be even more widely 

 appreciated on the Continent than at home. — " Bertrose," New Cross, 

 S.E. 



A REMINISCENCE. 



By T. J. Jenkins, L.C.P. 



{Reprinted by j^ermission from the Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham News). 



I am but just returned from his funeral. Many were gathered 

 around the grave, and all knew that they were paying a last tribute to 

 a great thinker. The majority thought of him as he had developed in 

 his life's work, some few of us were carried back to his early days, to 

 the Medway valley where he was born, and where first he gave promise 

 of great things. It seems but yesterday that I was waiting in Strood 

 High Street, on the steps of the old Fountain Inn, for Jim. That 

 {Scotch cap seldom could be found, and often we raced to school 

 nearly, but never quite, late. Memory gets farther back than that, 

 and I see ourselves in the little annexe of the school in Strood High 

 Street, kept by Miss West. How little we thought, that the young 

 teacher whom we plagued, Miss Appleton, would share grandparentage 

 with J. W. T. 



The burning out of the school separated us for a few months, but 

 as scholars at St. Nicholas we again joined each other, and carried on 

 a strange parallel that few school chums can have experienced. 



Through standard by standard we progressed, struggling and 

 striving in healthy jealousy against each other, thick in friendship one 

 day, breaking the peace another, yet ever held together by the joy of 

 service and the desire to succeed. 



In those earliest days there sprang into his being that force which 

 coloured his whole eventful life. He was a born naturalist before he 

 knew it, a lover of nature ere he comprehended the simplest of nature's 

 laws. A square yard or two of stale black earth was to him a paradise, 

 for there he could rear a few daffodils or a crocus, or a wallflower, 

 and love them for their very selves. We were great readers, devouring 

 all kinds of literature, especially tales of adventure and " daring do." 

 But he had, too, a disposition for action, and Avas at no time a 

 dreamer. He struck up a friendship with a labourer who was skilled 

 in bird catching and animal stuffiing. Then his home became 

 redolent of smells, neither sweet nor pleasant, and birds of all kinds 

 were stuffed and enclosed in cases, chiefly made of cigar boxes. So 

 his introduction to the Great Mother began. His tramps with his 

 elderly friend, chiefly taken in the evening, spread over wide areas. 

 Cuxton, Hailing, Swanscombe, Hoo, Chattenden, Cliffe, became his 

 happy hunting grounds, and his knowledge of country life, animate 

 or inanimate, broadened and deepened. He was then but nine years 

 of age. 



