1 68 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



* But imprudent courses do not always fail. 

 Sometimes a forlorn hope is justified by the event. 

 Though, along with other deterrents, many relapses, 

 now lasting for weeks, now for months, and once for 

 years, often made me despair of reaching the end, 

 yet at length the end is reached. Doubtless in 

 earlier years some exultation would have resulted ; 

 but as age creeps on feelings weaken, and now my 

 chief pleasure is in my emancipation. Still there is 

 satisfaction in the consciousness that losses, dis- 

 couragements, and shattered health have not pre- 

 vented me from fulfilling the purpose of my life.' 



These words recall a parallel invited by Gibbon's 

 record of his feelings on the completion of his im- 

 mortal work, when walking under the acacias of his 

 garden at Lausanne, he pondered on the * recovery 

 of his freedom, and perhaps the establishment of his 

 fame/ but with a * sober melancholy' at the thought 

 that c he had taken an everlasting leave of an old 

 and agreeable companion.' 



HERBERT SPENCER, spiritual descendant longo 

 intervallo of Heraclitus and Lucretius, was born 

 at Derby on the 2/th April 1820. His father 

 was a schoolmaster ; a man of scientific tastes, and, 

 it is interesting to note, secretary of the Derby 

 Philosophical Association founded by Erasmus 

 Darwin. In Mr. Spencer's book on Education there 

 are hints of his inheritance of the father's bent as an 

 observer and lover of nature in the remark that, 

 1 whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, 

 knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and 

 hedgerows can assume.' He was articled in his seven- 

 teenth year to a railway engineer, and followed that 



