76 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



subordinate facts into the background, and embellishing with 

 minor details here and there throughout, until the whole was 

 grouped into a striking and harmonious word-picture. There 

 was a marvellous verisimilitude about some of the Doctor's 

 stories ; so marvellous, in fact, that it occasionally happened 

 that a few shallow-pated listeners accepted the whole story 

 as perfectly true. 



But the Doctor was too much of an artist in such matters 

 not to know where and when to introduce some palpable 

 incongruity, or self-evident anachronism, which, to persons of 

 average intelligence, at once marked off the fiction from the 

 fact. I have heard many of the Doctor's stories, and have 

 been as much delighted and amused with them as any one 

 else ; but I never hesitated with regard to what he intended 

 I should believe. It is not every man that possesses this 

 faculty of presenting fact in the garb of fiction in such a 

 manner as to make it evident which was meant. It was 

 this same power of embellishing a few bare facts in such a 

 manner as to present them to his fellow-men in the form of 

 an interesting narrative, which formed the chief element of 

 success in the works of such writers as Sir Walter Scott, 

 Defoe, and others ; and it is well known that it is the 

 same faculty, manifested in a different form, which has 

 made one of Dr Heddle's daughters succeed as a writer of 

 fiction. 



Another characteristic of the Doctor calls for remark. 

 All of his acquaintances were made fully aware of the fact 

 that, for some few years past, Dr Heddle enjoyed bad health. 

 But so powerful was his interest in his favourite pursuits, 

 that the very mention of them would generally make him 

 forget all his ailments, real and imagined, and he was 

 then able to perform great walking feats, or to climb high 

 mountains, to wield ponderous hammers, or to carry heavy 

 bags of stones, each to an extent which few much younger men 

 could well imitate. The large size of his hammers was very 

 well known to his friends. The Doctor gave me a very big 

 one which had been much used in his past work; and another 

 one, much used in making his Scottish collection, will be 

 placed in the Museum here. Even his alpenstock was bigger 



