FRANCIS BALFOUR 103 



afternoons during half a term in cutting into thin slices 

 a small Amphioxus there was no automatic microscope 

 then, and each section had to be mounted on a separate 

 slide when really we should have been better employed 

 in rowing or in playing football. It was a curious, and 

 to me a still unexplained, result of Darwin's teaching 

 that the younger men who at a very great distance 

 followed his footsteps, followed them not in a direct 

 line but at an angle, a morphological, an embryological, 

 and an historical angle, an angle which, to use again an 

 Americanism, anyway pointed more to the dead than 

 the living. Professor Francis Balfour was about this 

 time finishing his epoch-making work on Comparative 

 Embryology. He was in a way the founder of a new 

 science, and without doubt was the most attractive man 

 I have ever met. He had to a peculiar degree that 

 elusive and indefinable quality, charm, and he charmed 

 us all. Educated humanity is ever turning this way 

 and that, trying to explore the unknown, to read the 

 riddle of our being. It will never be solved, and were it, 

 what would be left ? In the early 'eighties comparative 

 embryology seemed the most likely means of reaching 

 some solution of this eternal problem, and in a minor 

 way, under Balfour and his lieutenant Adam Sedgwick, 

 we all became comparative embryologists. 



Newton, however, had but little interest in such 

 subjects ; not that he opposed them in any way ; indeed, 

 he promoted them by his personal influence, and by 

 lending his demonstrator to the acting Head of the 

 Morphological Laboratory. Although in some respects 

 old-fashioned and with fixed ideas, he was like Mr. 

 Crisparkle's mother, " always open to discussion," but 

 he invariably looked, as the China shepherdess looked, 

 as though he would like to see the discussion that would 

 change his mind. 



