POPULAR LECTURES. 115 



"ally and apparently with no sense of their greatly 

 "superior importance." To great popular audiences this 

 practice only seemed like taking them into a familiar 

 intimacy, and it made them feel immediately at ease. In 

 each new town which he visited, he was always interested 

 in the leading industries and manufactures ; and some 

 apt illustration, borrowed perhaps from a local process 

 which he had that morning witnessed, caught the atten- 

 tion of his hearers, which never flagged to the close. 

 Nothing, indeed, was more striking than the breathless 

 suspense with which a complicated argument would be 

 followed, the gathering excitement as the conclusion to 

 which it pointed first came distantly into view, and the 

 burst of applause attending its final demonstration. But 

 Dr. Carpenter was never dependent on the stimulus 

 afforded by these popular manifestations. He was very 

 generous of his time and thought even for small causes. 

 He would take as much pains to speak to a little band 

 assembled in the school-room at Hampstead,* or to the 

 poor and uncultivated at an East-end Mission, as to his 

 equals and critics at the Royal Institution, or the huge 

 and eager gatherings of a northern town. 



Such lecture-tours, however, were the recreation of Dr. 

 Carpenter's spare time, rather than the occupation of the 

 working hours saved from his University duty. These 

 were devoted with unflagging vigour to the various 

 branches of research in which he was continuously en- 

 gaged. One little stream of notes and papers communi- 

 cated to the scientific periodicals dealt with his former 

 clients, Comatula and Eozoon. Another was concerned 

 with the theory of oceanic circulation, currents, tempera- 



* Only last summer a gardener at Hampstead referred to a lecture on 

 mildew, delivered many years before, as having been of great practical use 

 to him. 



