LIFE AT OXFORD. vH 



have produced, within a short space of time, two such leaders of 

 zoology as Moseley and the late Francis Maitland Balfour ; and 

 there is the melancholy parallel between them, that both were cut 

 off prematurely in the zenith of their scientific careers. Balfour, 

 it should be remembered, was by some years Moseley's junior. 



A field naturalist loves the meadows and hedgerows better 

 than the cricket and football field, and thus Moseley gained 

 no distinction in ordinary school games, though he took a 

 great interest in them throughout his life ; he was, how- 

 ever, a very good racket player, a game in which his excep- 

 tionally quick eyesight served him in good stead. He was 

 above all things a sportsman, and had a marvellous eye for 

 objects in the country. I have often wondered at the quick- 

 ness with which he detected birds' nests, insects, etc., on a 

 country walk, and this during his later days at Oxford, when 

 he was often suffering from severe headaches and depression, 

 the result of overwork. 



In 1864 Moseley entered Exeter College, Oxford. He was 

 intended, very much against his own will, for a mathematical 

 or a classical degree, and consequently spent his first under- 

 graduate days much as he had spent his time at Harrow, in 

 rat-hunting and collecting. He used to tell me that, had it 

 not been for the intervention of a clergyman, an old friend of 

 his father's, who discovered him at Exeter given up to idle- 

 ness and collecting beetles, he would never have had the 

 chance of starting on the career in which he made himself so 

 great a name. He was allowed, as a last chance of academical 

 salvation, to join Professor RoUeston's laboratory, and to enter 

 for the examination in the Honour School of Natural Science. 

 Into this congenial work Moseley threw himself heart and soul, 

 and came out with a First Class in 1868, together with Ray 

 Lankester, with whom he had made fast friends in RoUeston's 

 laboratory. In those days honours in Anatomy led naturally 

 to a medical career ; Moseley was elected to a Radcliffe 

 Travelling Fellowship, and, in company with Ray 1 Lankester — 

 the two were inseparable up to the date of the "Challenger" 

 voyage — went to Vienna, where he studied in Rokitanski's 

 laboratory, and attended courses under Jaeger, Politzer, Braun, 



