Cu. IV.] REMINISCENCES. 79 



Much of his scientific reading was in German, and this was 

 a serious labour to him ; in reading a book after him, I was 

 often struck at seeing, from the pencil-marks made each day 

 w here he left off, how little he could read at a time. He used 

 to call German the " Verdammte," pronounced as if in 

 English. He was especially indignant with Germans, because 

 ho was convinced that they could write simply if they chose, 

 and often praised Professor Hildobrand of Freiburg for writing 

 German which was as clear as French. He sometimes gavo a 

 German sentence to a friend, a patriotic German lady, and 

 used to laugh at her if sho did not translate it fluently. He 

 himself leant German simply by hammering away with a 

 dictionary ; ho would say that his only way was to read a 

 sentence a great many times over, and at last the meaning 

 occurred to him. When lie began German long ago, he boasted 

 of the fact (as he used to tell) to Sir J. Hooker, who replied, 

 11 Ah, my dear fellow, that's nothing ; I've begun it many 

 times." 



In spite of his want of grammar, ho managed to get on 

 wonderfully with German, and the sentences that he failed to 

 make out were generally difficult ones. He never attempted 

 to speak German correctly, but pronounced the words as 

 though they were English ; and this made it not a littlo 

 difficult to help him, when he read out a German sentence 

 and asked for a translation. He certainly had a bad ear for 

 vocal sounds, so that he found it impossible to perceive small 

 differences in pronunciation. 



His wide interest in branches of science that were not 

 specially his own was remarkable. In the biological sciences 

 his doctrines make themselves felt so widely that there was 

 something interesting to him in most departments. He read a 

 good deal of many quite special works, and large parts of text 

 books, such as Huxley's Invertebrate Anatomy, or such a book 

 as Balfour's Embryology, where the detail, at any rate, was not 

 specially in his own line. And in the case of elaborate books 

 of the monograph type, though he did not make a study of 

 them, yet he felt the strongest admiration for them. 



In the non-biological sciences he felt keen sympathy with 

 work of which he could not really judge. For instance, he 

 used to read nearly the whole of Nature, though so much of 

 it deals with mathematics and physics. I have often heard 

 him say that he got a kind of satisfaction in reading articles 

 which (according to himself) he could not understand. I wish 

 I could reproduce the manner in which he would laugh at 

 himself for it. 



