xx INTRODUCTION 



were happening to me mentally. First I was be- 

 coming more and more absorbed by zoology, for I 

 was a professional zoologist. Germany acquired a 

 new significance for me ; it was not a great nation 

 among other nations, but the place where certain 

 laboratories and universities were situated, the 

 country of Leuckart and Weismann, Wiedersheim 

 and the Hertwigs, and of a host of other and younger 

 men whom I came to know personally or by corres- 

 pondence. I read German, abstracted German, 

 published translations of German, but it was all 

 technical, zoological German, and when I was in 

 Germany talking with Germans, the theories of 

 heredity or the origin of mesoblast and not the 

 political designs of our respective countries interested 

 us. 



The second mental event was the dawning of 

 Russian and French literature on me. Before I went 

 to Oxford I had read no Russian author, and little 

 in French, except school-books. It was the accident 

 of reading Russian with W. R. Morfill for a technical 

 purpose, that led me to Pushkin and Lermontov, 

 Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoi, and so to a new 

 aspect of life, sweeter, richer and more compas- 

 sionately objective than anything I had imagined. 

 French I read from design, at first merely to provide 

 an interest remote in manner and matter from my 

 daily work, afterwards as an increasing delight. Here 

 for the first time I shall admit what you shall call pre- 

 judice if it please you. I began with Balzac, and I 

 have gone on to Jules Romains, and probably for the 

 last twenty years there has been no day in which 

 I could read and have not spent half an hour with a 



