1 86 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



breath is suddenly checked. A very little seems 

 sufficient to divert attention from that desire, and to 

 leave the sense only of being ill and on the point of 

 swooning. My chief experiences may seem hardly 

 credible ; they were due to a fancy of mine to obtain 

 distinct vision when diving. The convex eyeball 

 stamps a concave lens in the water, whose effect has 

 to be neutralised by a convex lens. This has to be 

 very "strong," because the refractive power of a lens 

 is greatly diminished by immersion in water. My 

 first experiment was in a bath, using the two objectives 

 of my opera-glass in combination, and with some 

 success. I then had spectacles made for me, which I 

 described at the British Association in 1865 [19]. 

 With these I could read the print of a newspaper 

 perfectly under water, when it was held at the exact 

 distance of clear vision, but the range of clear vision 

 was small. I amused myself very frequently with 

 this new hobby, and being most interested in the act 

 of reading, constantly forgot that I was nearly suffo- 

 cating myself, and was recalled to the fact not by any 

 gasping desire for breath, but purely by a sense of 

 illness, that alarmed me. It disappeared immediately 

 after raising the head out of water and inhaling two 

 or three good whiffs of air. 



Mr. Alexander Macmillan asked me in the later 

 fifties to undertake the editorship of a volume to be 

 called Vacation To^lr^sts [i i], which would be repeated 

 annually if the venture succeeded. His view was 

 that many able young men travelled every summer, 

 each of whom would have enough to say to make a 

 good article, and that a collection of their contributions 

 would suffice for an interesting annual volume. I 



