WORK. 145 



remember the quick movement of his head up and down as 

 he looked from the object to the notes. 



He saved a great deal of time through not having to do 

 things twice. Although he would patiently go on repeating 

 experiments where there was any good to be gained, he could 

 not endure having to repeat an experiment which ought, if 

 complete care had been taken, to have succeeded the first 

 time and this gave him a continual anxiety that the experi- 

 ment should not be wasted ; he felt the experiment to be 

 sacred, however slight a one it was. He wished to learn as much 

 as possible from an experiment, so that he did not confine 

 himself to observing the single point to which the experiment 

 was directed, and his power of seeing a number of other things 

 was wonderful. I do not think he cared for preliminary or 

 rough observations intended to serve as guides and to be 

 repeated. Any experiment done was to be of some use, and 

 in this connection I remember how strongly he urged the 

 necessity of keeping the notes of experiments which failed, 

 and to this rule he always adhered. 



In the literary part of his work he had the same horror of 

 losing time, and the same zeal in what he was doing at the 

 moment, and this made him careful not to be obliged unneces- 

 sarily to read anything a second time. 



His natural tendency was to use simple methods and 

 few instruments. The use of the compound microscope has 

 much increased since his youth, and this at the expense of the 

 simple one. It strikes us nowadays as extraordinary that 

 he should have had no compound microscope when he went 

 his Beagle voyage ; but in this he followed the advice of 

 Robt. Brown, who was an authority in such matters. He 

 always had a great liking for the simple microscope, and 

 maintained that nowadays it was too much neglected, and that 

 one ought always to see as much as possible with the simple 

 before taking to the compound microscope. In one of his 

 letters he speaks on this point, and remarks that he always 



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