Ipi t fc * "* | fcc ? /;<. .Alexander Goodman More. [isso 



with the family of the Marquis of Huntley and with Lord 

 Byron. 



Having thus practically none but Scottish blood on 

 his father's side, he was equally English on his mother's. 

 His own second name was that of his mother's family the 

 Goodmans, of Leeds. 



It cannot be said that the taste for natural history 

 which distinguished the son was inherited to any conspi- 

 cuous extent from either parent ; though his father was, 

 undoubtedly, fond of animals, and his mother of flowers. 



Alexander Goodman was the eldest of three children. 

 From infancy he was remarkably delicate ; and was pri- 

 vately baptised. His parents lived at Woodford, in Essex, 

 during the days of his earliest childhood ; and here was 

 baptised in 1834, the third and youngest of the children, 

 his only brother, George. 



A few changes of residence, but never far from Lon- 

 don annual visits, during the summer months, to Broad- 

 stairs Alexander's going to Scotland, when three years 

 old, to see his grandfather and his father's going away 

 the next year on an expedition into Russia seem to have 

 been the principal occurrences in the family history until 

 the year 1837, an d are mentioned by the eldest boy in a 

 curious little journal which, at that early period, he had 

 begun to keep. 



But early in this year scarlatina attacked the three 

 children, and carried off George. Grief at the loss of his 

 little boy determined Mr. More to break up his home in 

 England, and remove the family for some years to Switzer- 

 land. They went abroad in the course of the summer, and 

 after visiting Paris, Lyons, Geneva, Vevey, Berne, and 

 Interlaken, settled at Renens, near Lausanne. 



The change from the environs of London to the fresh 

 and beautiful surroundings of the Swiss home at once 

 awakened in the boy of six that taste for natural history 

 for which throughout the remainder of his life he was so 

 remarkable. Indeed, even at Paris he mentioned in his 

 Journal having seen " Le Jardin des Plantes and other 

 fine things." But it appears to have been in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Interlaken that some of his strongest early 



