xLiv BEGINNING OF LAST ILLNESS 295 



On January 20 there is an entry in his diary : 

 " I have been working at my answers to criticisms 

 on Prehistoric Times and the History of Civilisa- 

 tion.'''' A letter on the subject of primitive 

 marriage, which was one of the vexed questions 

 that this criticism raised, has been quoted in 

 the previous chapter. Under the same date he 

 notices a book which he shortly afterwards 

 published with the title of Marriage, Totemism 

 and Religion. In one entry in the journal it is 

 referred to as " Marriage, Exogamy and Religion," 

 as if this title, indicating the attention given in 

 its pages to the question of marriage outside the 

 tribe, had been contemplated for it ; but eventu- 

 ally it came out under the former heading. 



He had given up his work on " pollen," which 

 has been spoken of once or twice, and of all his 

 studies of the kind this was the one from which he 

 deemed that he had least result. He contributed 

 a paper, dealing chiefly with the shapes of different 

 pollen, to the Microscopical Society, and I well 

 remember his telling me that some of the pollen 

 globes which were discharged to fly in the air 

 were roughened on the surface, and he wondered 

 whether this roughening had a like effect to the 

 nicking of the surface of a golf ball, and helped it 

 to fly farther ; for it is well known that a smooth- 

 faced golf ball will fly hardly at all. His son 

 Eric, as already noticed, was his chief helper in 

 this study, and he used, when his father was ill, 

 to take him about the long terraces at High Elms 

 and the grass rides through the woods, in a Bath- 

 chair, talking to him all the time and speculating 

 about Nature. 



