102 REMINISCENCES. [Ch. IV. 



Connected with his contempt for the undue love of fame, 

 was an equally strong dislike of all questions of priority. The 

 letters to Lyell, at the time of the Origin, show the anger he 

 felt with himself for not being able to repress a feeling of 

 disappointment at what he thought was Mr. Wallace's fore- 

 stalling of all his years of work. His sense of literary honour 

 comes out strongly in these letters; and his feeling about 

 priority is again shown in the admiration expressed in his 

 Becollections of Mr. Wallace's self-annihilation. 



His feeling about reclamations, including answers to attacks 

 and all kinds of discussions, was strong. It is simply ex- 

 pressed in a letter to Falconer (1863): "If I ever felt angry 

 towards you, for whom I have a sincere friendship, I should 

 begin to suspect that I was a little mad. I was very sorry 

 about your reclamation, as I think it is in every case a mistake 

 and should be left to others. Whether I should so act myself 

 under provocation is a different question." It was a feeling 

 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. Ho bore his illness with 

 such uncomplaining patience, that even his children can 

 hardly, I believe, realise the extent of his habitual suffering. 

 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. No 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 



* He departed from his rule in his "Note on the Habits of the 

 Pampas Woodpecker, Colaptes campestris," Proc. Zool. Soo., 3870, p. 705: 

 also in a letter published in the Athenseum (1863, p. 554), in which case 

 he afterwards regretted that he had not remained silent. His replies to 

 criticisms, in the latter editions of the Origin, can hardly be classed as 

 infractions of his rule. 



