172 THE LIFE OF F HI LIP HENRY GOSSE. 



Baird, a biologist of some distinction in his time, had been 

 an assistant in the British Museum since 1841 ; Whymper, 

 the principal water-colour painter and engraver of scientific 

 illustrations in that generation, was an hahitu^ of the 

 scientific departments of the Museum, in which John 

 Edward Gray and George Richard Gray already held posi- 

 tions of considerable influence. Of the brilliant, affec- 

 tionate, and eccentric Adam White, little now remains in 

 memory, but if he was the least distinguished, he was far 

 from being the least beloved. Of the whole group of 

 young naturalists, then all full of ardour, and already either 

 famous or on the road to fame, the only one who survives 

 is the venerable John Obadiah Westwood, now in his 

 eighty-sixth year, but still Hope Professor of Zoology at 

 Oxford, who in 1843 was already eminent for his Ento- 

 mologist's Text-Book of 1838 and his British Butterflies of 

 1841. 



Association with those and other scientific friends 

 effected a rather sudden expansion in Gosse's social nature. 

 The reserved and saturnine young man, absorbed in his 

 own thoughts, developed into the enthusiastic companion 

 in and sympathizer with the studies of others. The 

 journey from Hackney to the British Museum began to 

 prove a tedious waste of time, and towards the close of 

 1843 he moved further into London, renting a small house 

 in Kentish Town, No. 73, Gloucester Place, the last, at that 

 time, on the northern side of the street, recently built, 

 having behind it a long " garden " of heavy clay soil, mere 

 broken meadow not yet subdued. Hither he and his 

 mother removed, and soon he invited his aged father — who 

 was now quite an invalid, and in his seventy-eighth year — 

 to come up from the West of England and join them. 

 Behind the garden of this house, there stretched away 

 waste fields to the north, and here, one night in the early 



