"NATURAL SELECTION." 27:i 



waiting for a few minutes, he was sure to be found 

 deeply interested in some book taken up at random from 

 the table. Yet he assimilated and remembered all this 

 seemingly desultory reading in the most marvellous 

 manner. He could usually quote all the most striking 

 passages from any book or poem that he had read more 

 than once, and kept all the vast amount of information 

 that he had picked up on various subjects pigeon-holed 

 away in the recesses of his own mind, yet so arranged 

 and labelled, so to speak, that he could lay his hand 

 upon it at an instant's notice. And he also possessed 

 the great faculty of intuitively selecting the few items 

 of value from the worthless mass, so that the latter 

 passed away at once, while the former remained with 

 him for ever. 



These heavy and incessant labours my father main- 

 tained, with scarcely a day's intermission, to the end 

 of his life. Indeed, in all my memory of him, I cannot 

 recollect that he more than once gave himself a 

 holiday of above a week's duration. And even his 

 brief occasional periods of leisure were usually occupied 

 in visiting museums, menageries, or libraries, and 

 making out copious notes for future use. He had a 

 perfect multiplicity of note-books, of all shapes, sorts, 

 and sizes, from a microscopical volume of scarcely more 

 than postage-stamp size, which he carried in his waist- 

 coat pocket, to the bulky quarto in which were arranged 

 drawings, photographs, cuttings, and extracts on almost 

 every subject under the sun. For he by no means con- 

 fined himself to the topics of his own professional 



