48 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



To Miss Mary Carpenter. 



London, November 3, 1850. 

 I have had a regular torrent of interruptions, so that if it 

 continues I shall really be driven for a month or so to a country 

 lodging where I may experience the blessed consciousness that 

 no one can come in upon me. I try to exercise Christian 

 charity towards the many people who bother me ; but it is really 

 very difficult to do so when one feels driven to desperation by 

 the want of power to fulfil one's engagements, to say nothing of 

 the misery of having one's trains of thought interrupted, and 

 the provoking consciousness that no sacrifice of one's self will 

 remedy the evil, since my brain (and it is well for me that it is 

 so) breaks down at once under overwork, and refuses to labour 

 for more than twelve hours a day, by the very simple process 

 of going to sleep over my pages. So when it will spin nothing 

 more, I betake myself upstairs to tea, and finish in the evening 

 with music and microscopizing ; the latter being a special delight 

 to me at the present time, as I have found the most interesting 

 things possible among my Australian dredgings, namely, the 

 recent types of all my most interesting forms of fossil Forami- 

 nifera (I only last night discovered the one wanting to com- 

 plete the list), confirming all that I had advanced respecting 

 them, with other forms entirely new. I do not know when I 

 have been more fascinated by anything. 



By the side of these minute investigations he was at the 

 same time pursuing two important lines of thought, not 

 wholly unrelated to each other, both of which had for a 

 long time engaged his attention. The connection sub- 

 sisting between the different forces of Nature had excited 

 his boyish interest when Mr. Exley had expounded to a 

 Bristol audience that " new theory of matter " by which all 

 the attractions of gravitation, cohesion, electricity, and the 

 rest, might be explained upon the same principles. In 

 dealing with the " laws regulating vital and physical pheno- 

 mena," he had looked forward to a time when it might be 



