502 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



May we not call his life, first and last, beautiful, 

 august, heroic ? From his father, whose very image he 

 in his later years became, he derived the ground- work of 

 his character, and for the education of conscience he was 

 primarily indebted, though he little knew it at the time, 

 to his Uncle James. In early manhood he was encom- 

 passed with hardship, with coarseness, with manifold 

 temptation. His soul took no taint. He rose superior to 

 every form of vulgarity, the vulgar ambition of wealth, 

 the vulgar ambition of notoriety, the vulgar baseness of 

 sensuality and licence. He aspired to fame, but it was 

 to fame which should be the ratification of his own 

 severe judgment. ' I have myself,' he said, ' for my 

 critic ; ' and while the decision of this sternest censor 

 was even moderately favourable, no sneers could de- 

 press, no applause elate him. His course, thencefor- 

 ward, was a steadfast pursuit of truth and of knowledge, 

 an unwearied dedication of himself to all that he believed 

 to be true, and honest, and lovely, and of good report. 

 In the meridian of his years, he threw himself into the 

 noblest religious movement of his time, impelling and 

 directing it, a movement which he largely contributed 

 to carry to a triumphant issue. As his science had 

 begun in converse with nature, so he carried on the 

 study day by day and year by year, traversing thou- 

 sands of miles for express purposes of observation, and 

 at all moments, at home or in the field, he was awake with 

 keenest vigilance to the powers of nature at work around 

 him. Modern in all his habits of study, he did not, in 

 tracing the surface light of science, forget that Divine 

 mystery which nature shadows forth. God in the uni- 

 verse was for him a reality as forceful and present as 

 for those Hebrew psalmists whom it inspired with the 

 ublimest strains in existence. The autumn blast raised 



