24 LIFE OF SIR JOHN LUBBOCK oh. 



elected a member of the Royal Society. It would be 

 impossible for me to express how much of my real educa- 

 tion I owe to the advice, the sympathy, and the example 

 of these kind friends. 



It was really a wonderful society into which 

 the boy thus found himself admitted, and never 

 was there a boy better able to make good use 

 of these exceptional advantages ; but it is hardly 

 to be said that it was gay. The element of 

 youth was singularly lacking. Yet elsewhere 

 his natural joy of life found more natural outlets. 

 " I was very fond of cricket," he writes, " and 

 for some years acted as secretary to the West 

 Kent Cricket Club. We used to practise at 

 Chislehurst every Saturday. Being then only 

 15 I was at first allowed many holidays (from 

 the business), my father knowing that I was 

 working hard. But after the death of my father's 

 partners he and I could not be away together. 

 Moreover Sydenham was our nearest station, so 

 that we had to drive over twenty miles every 

 day." 



It is worth a moment's pause to realise what 

 it all meant — the boy leaving school at fourteen 

 to go straight into the banking business, and 

 only a year later sharing with his father the 

 responsible position of a working partner — either 

 he or his father bound to be there — as if on his 

 fifteen-years-old shoulders might all the burden be 

 borne on the days when his father, engrossed in 

 the higher mathematics, gave finance a holiday ! 

 And the twenty miles or more of drive ! It is 

 rather a pathetic picture. Perhaps it is no wonder 

 that, with his zeal for acquiring various knowledge, 



