Oh. IV.] REMINISCENCES. 99 



tics duo to tho omission of a necessary link in the reasoning, 

 evidontly omittod through familiarity with the subject. Not 

 that there was any fault in tho sequence of the thoughts, but 

 that from familiarity with his argument he did not notice 

 when the words failed to reproduce his thought. He also 

 frequently put too much matter into one sentence, so that it 

 had to be cut up into two. 



On the whole, I think the pains which my father took oyer 

 tho literary part of the work was very remarkable. He often 

 laughed or grumbled at himself for the difficulty which he 

 found in writing English, saying, for instance, that if a bad 

 arrangement of a sentence was possible, he should be sure to 

 adopt it. He once got much amusement and satisfaction out 

 of the difficulty which one of the family found in writing a 

 short circular. He had the pleasure of correcting and laughing 

 at obscurities, involved sentences, and other defects, and thus 

 took his revenge for all the criticism he had himself to bear 

 with. Ho would quote with astonishment Miss Martineau's 

 advice to young authors, to write straight off and send the 

 MS. to the printer without correction. But in some cases he 

 acted in a somewhat similar manner. When a sentence 

 became hopelessly involved, he would ask himself, " now what 

 do you want to say?" and his answer written down, would 

 often disentangle the confusion. 



His stylo has been much praised ; on the other hand, at 

 least one good judge has remarked to me that it is not a good 

 style. It is, above all things, direct and clear; and it is 

 characteristic of himself in its simplicity bordering on naivete, 

 and in its absence of pretence. He had the strongest disbelief 

 in the common idea that a classical scholar must write good 

 English ; indeed, he thought that the contrary was the case. 

 In writing, he sometimes showed tho same tendency to strong 

 expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, 

 p. 440, there is a description of a larval cirripede, " with six 

 pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magni- 

 ficent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae." Wo 

 used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an 

 advertisement. This tendency to give himself up to tho 

 enthusiastic turn of his thought, without fear of being ludicrous 

 appears elsewhere in his writings. 



His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is 

 remarkable, and it must be partly this quality which revealed 

 his personal sweetness of character to so many who had never 

 seen him. I have always felt it to be a curious fact, that 

 he who has altered the face of Biological Science, and is in 



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