94 THE SALT OF MY LIFE 



by Couch and Day, and perhaps too by some less 

 scrupulous to acknowledge the assistance they 

 owed to his first-hand observation of sea life. 

 Whether a more academic training would have 

 made or marred the man it is not easy to say, for 

 something depends on the point of view. On the 

 one hand, he sometimes admitted that he felt 

 the loss of such education when contributing to 

 the transactions of scientific institutes, or to the 

 more critical pages of the Contemporary Review. 

 He was impatient to find men who had not half 

 his facts, who had never felt Nature's throbbing 

 pulse, so facile with the pen as to carry away their 

 readers with the merest dole of evidence spread 

 over their paper. On the other hand, the image 

 of Dunn in a frock coat, lecturing to idlers and dul- 

 lards from the platform, is not a pleasing one, and, 

 if one may judge from the lack of spontaneous 

 observation in the bulk of current biological litera- 

 ture, it is difficult not to conclude that he was the 

 better for what he regarded as his defects. Any 

 fool who has been through schools can lisp a Greek 

 tag, but the tense grip of Nature, the birthright 

 of one who has spent long nights out on those 

 mystic seas in all their changing moods, is not im- 

 parted by men in gowns. His writings, shorn of 

 " frills," were always to the point. Here and there 

 as I look them through, they give a gleam of 

 humour too biting to have been always appreciated 



