REMINISCENCES. lix 



of kindred tastes. The shyest lad was never afraid of him when 

 once the ice had been broken, and we used to question him freely, 

 without any reserve, about any natural objects we had noted or 

 collected. He never betrayed the least impatience with any young- 

 ster who came to him for information, and if his own stores of 

 knowledge did not supply the answer to the question, he could 

 generally tell where it might be found. The appearance of his 

 rooms testified to the methodical habit of mind which made him so 

 useful to other people. He was always willing to take an under- 

 graduate as a companion for a walk, in the days when walking, 

 riding, or boating were the only modes of exercise in vogue during 

 the winter half of the year ; and a walk with him was as healthy 

 and pleasant a recreation as a student jaded with mathematics or 

 classics could well have. He knew all the haunts of plants and 

 insects in the county, and it was a pleasure to him and to the four 

 or five who sometimes accompanied him on a long day's ramble, to 

 try and find something new to him as a denizen of the locality we 

 were exploring ; while such a search exercised in the best possible 

 way our own knowledge and powers of observation. 



Of course his science was not exactly what is most cultivated at 

 the present day. We now delight to scan the minute anatomy of 

 plant or animal, and to trace the physical or chemical actions by 

 which it grows and breathes, lives and dies. But Babington, while 

 he did not in the least despise such researches, loved Nature in its 

 completeness ; it was the living plant or animal he liked to study, 

 its likes and dislikes, its choice of domicile, its habits and inherited 

 instincts. In fact, its manner of life and the way in which it 

 adapted itself to circumstances, the modes in which it approached 

 to being an intelligent creature, were much more to him than the 

 machine, however beautiful. His was just that love of living Nature 

 which makes Gilbert White's letters so charming, and which Hens- 

 low and Charles Darwin had in a marked degree, and like true love 

 it was utterly unostentatious. No one who does anything to 

 advance science can entirely escape controversy, and Babington was 

 no exception to this rule, but I never knew him use unkind words 

 of any opponent, though I have heard him, with good-humoured 

 sarcasm, express his contempt for mutual admiration societies, and 

 for the desire to make capital out of scientific discoveries. By such 

 a life Babington did more than the University at large are now 

 at all aware, to promote the study of biology in the dark days that 

 immediately preceded the dawn of the present system. I have 

 dwelt on matters which my personal acquaintance with Babington 

 brought under my notice, but there were more public ways in which 

 he shewed his readiness to work, unpaid if need be, for the advance 

 of science. At the first meeting of the British Association in 

 Cambridge, in 1833, when it was much less of a holiday gathering 

 than it has since become, we find him acting as secretary of Section 

 D, Zoology and Botany; and in subsequent years, 1853, 1858, and 



