102 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



which, to this day, a more orderly work on the insects of 

 Newfoundland might, no doubt, with great propriety be 

 enriched. The main value of this lengthy production was 

 the familiarity with the use of the pen which it supplied. 

 It is a main feat for an unfledged author when he succeeds 

 in setting Explicit at the bottom of a body of manuscript. 

 He has learned the lesson of literary life, not to grow 

 weary of well-doing. The unlucky Entomology of New- 

 foundland was a mere preamble to a far more important 

 occupation, that of collecting materials for a work, the 

 pecuniary success of which was to be an epoch in my 

 father's life, and to make him an author by profession. 

 This was his Canadian Naturalist. " The whole plan of 

 this work occurred to me," he says in a letter of 1840, " and 

 was at once sketched in my mind, one day as I was 

 walking up to Tilden's, the road that led along from my 

 maple grove westward through the woods. It was a lovely 

 spring day, the nth of May, 1837, the day before my 

 brother arrived. I had a large amount of material 

 already in my entomological journal, and thenceforward I 

 kept my eyes always wide open for every other branch 

 of natural history. It was Sir Humphrey Davy's 

 Salmojtia ; or Days of Fly-Fishing, that formed my model 

 for the dialogue. The work remains a vivid picture of 

 what chiefly engaged my thoughts during my three 

 Canadian years." He ceased, with this wider ambition, to 

 be merely an entomologist ; he became a naturalist in the 

 broader and fuller sense. 



During the first eighteen months his letters home were 

 still sanguine, and, despite the discomforts and limitations 

 of the life at Compton, he continued to urge the members 

 of his family to join him. In May, 1837, in fact, his younger 

 brother came, but stayed only six months, and returned, 

 bitterly disenchanted, to England. I do not, indeed, find it 



