122 REMINISCENCES. 



time — and this gave him a continual anxiety that the experi- 

 ment should not be wasted; he felt the experiment to be 

 sacred, however slight a one it was. He wished to learn as 

 much as possible from an experiment, so that he did not con- 

 fine himself to observing the single point to which the experi- 

 ment was directed, and his power of seeing a number of other 

 things was wonderful. I do not think he cared for prelimi- 

 nary or rough observation intended to serve as guides and 

 to be repeated. Any experiment done was to be of some use, 

 and in this connection I remember how strongly he urged the 

 necessity of keeping the notes of experiments which failed, 

 and to this rule he always adhered. 



In the literary part of his work he had the same horror of 

 losing time, and the same zeal in what he was doing at the 

 moment, and this made him careful not to be obliged unneces- 

 sarily to read anything a second time. 



His natural tendency was to use simple methods and few 

 instruments. The use of the compound microscope has much 

 increased since his youth, and this at the expense of the 

 simple one. It strikes us nowadays as extraordinary that he 

 should have had no compound microscope when he went his 

 Beagle voyage ; but in this he followed the advice of Robt. 

 Brown, who was an authority in such matters. He always 

 had a great liking for the simple microscope, and maintained 

 that nowadays it was too much neglected, and that one ought 

 always to see as much as possible with the simple before 

 taking to the compound microscope. In one of his letters 

 he speaks on this point, and remarks that he always sus- 

 pects the work of a man who never uses the simple micro- 

 scope. 



His dissecting table was a thick board, let into a window 

 of the study ; it was lower than an ordinary table, so that he 

 could not have worked at it standing ; but this, from wishing 

 to save his strength, he would not have done in any case. He 

 sat at his dissecting-table on a curious low stool which had 

 belonged to his father, with a seat revolving on a vertical 

 spindle, and mounted on large castors, so that he could turn 



