THE CROWNING YEARS 313 



to his beloved Italy. There was another reason 

 for his flight. His seventieth birthday was ap- 

 proaching. He had declared at the banquet given 

 in his honour on the occasion of his sixtieth birth- 

 day, that if he lived for the seventieth he would 

 ** bury himself in some dark corner of the 

 Thuringian forest, far aw^ay from all festivities.'* 

 Strenuous and exacting as the ten years had been, 

 he now found himself on the threshold of his 

 eighth decade of life. His wife, also, was ailing, 

 and they both proceeded to the Italian Riviera 

 at the beginning of the winter. Few of his 

 friends were informed where he was. ''I want," 

 he wrote to me, " to pass my seventieth birthday 

 in peace." He settled at Rapallo, and at once 

 commenced his favourite fishing for the tiny in- 

 habitants of the Mediterranean. The '^ cloistral 

 quietness " of the little town, the daily prospect 

 of the blue Mediterranean, ^* the solitary walks 

 in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Apennines, 

 and the uplifting sight of their forest-crowned 

 mountain-altars" restored his freshness of spirit. 

 Once more a vast labour lay before him. He 

 had promised a work that would answer all 

 biological questions addressed to him in the 5,000 

 letters of his correspondents. He had all the 

 queries, all the criticisms of his views, all the 

 latest literature of the subject, to digest into a 

 compact volume. The result was a new work of 

 557 pages. The Wonders of Life, a remarkable 

 summary of his zoological and botanical know- 

 ledge, with excursions into psychology, suicide, 



