ILL-HEALTH. 159 



partly dictated by instinctive delicacy, and partly by a strong 

 sense of the waste of time, energy, and temper thus caused. 

 He said that he owed his determination not to get into dis- 

 cussions* to the advice of Lyell, advice which he trans- 

 mitted to those among his friends who were given to paper 

 warfare. 



If the character of my father's working life is to be under- 

 stood, the conditions of ill-health, under which he worked, 

 must be constantly borne in mind. He bore his illness with 

 such uncomplaining patience, that even his children can 

 hardly, I believe, realise the extent of his habitual suf- 

 fering. In their case the difficulty is heightened by the 

 fact that, from the days of their earliest recollections, they 

 saw him in constant ill-health, and saw him, in spite of it, 

 full of pleasure in what pleased them. Thus, in later life, 

 their perception of what he endured had to be disentangled 

 from the impression produced in childhood by constant 

 genial kindness under conditions of unrecognised difficulty. 

 Nc^ one indeed, except my mother, knows the full amount of 

 suffering he endured, or the full amount of his wonderful 

 patience. For all the latter years of his life she never left 

 him for a night ; and her days were so planned that all his 

 resting hours might be shared with her. She shielded him 

 from every avoidable annoyance, and omitted nothing that 

 might save him trouble, or prevent him becoming overtired, 

 or that might alleviate the many discomforts of his ill- 

 health. I hesitate to speak thus freely of a thing so sacred 

 as the life-long devotion which prompted all this constant 



* He departed from his rule in p. 554), in which case he afterwards 



his " Note on the Habits of the regretted that he had not remained 



Pampas Woodpecker, Colaptes silent. His replies to criticisms, 



campestris? ' Proc. Zool. Soc.,' in the later editions of the ' Origin,' 



1870, p. 705 : also in a letter pub- can hardly be classed as infractions 



lished in the 'Athenaeum' (1863, of his rule. 



