CHAP. xvi. DR. CHAMBERS' 1 ACCOUNT. 247 



tion. He is only a private in the mounted guard 

 (preventive service) at an obscure part of the Cornish 

 coast, with four shillings a day, and a wife and seven 

 children, most of whose education he has himself to 

 conduct. He never tastes the luxuries which are so 

 common in the middle ranks of life, and even amongst 

 a large portion of the working classes. He has to mend 

 with his own hands every sort of thing that can wear or 

 break in his house. Yet Charles Peach is a votary of 

 natural history not a student of the science in books, 

 for he cannot afford books ; but he is a diligent investi- 

 gator by sea and shore, a collector of zoophytes and 

 echinodermata strange creatures, many of which are 

 as yet hardly known to man. These he collects, pre- 

 serves, and describes ; and every year he comes up to 

 the British Association with a few novelties of this 

 kind, accompanied by illustrative papers and drawings 

 thus, under circumstances the very opposite of such 

 men as Lord Enniskillen, adding, in like manner, to the 

 general stock of knowledge. 



" On the present occasion he is unusually elated, for 

 he has made the discovery of a holothuria with twenty 

 tentacula, a species of the echinodermata, which Edward 

 Forbes, in his book on Starfishes, had said was never 

 yet observed in the British seas. It may be of small 

 moment to you, who perhaps know nothing of holo- 

 thurias, but it is a considerable thing to the fauna of 

 Britain,* and a vast matter to a poor private of the 



* About thirty years after the meeting at York, the Neill Prize 

 Gold Medal was presented to Mr. Peach by the Royal Society of Edia- 



