232 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



distinct works, a row of volumes enough in themselves to 

 form the whole baggage of many a literary traveller. Of 

 these, four had been compilations of an historical and 

 archaeological cast, undertaken solely on account of their 

 semi-religious subject. Six others were handbooks of 

 zoological information — " pot-boilers," as they might be 

 called in the slang to-day — but all of them conscientiously, 

 minutely, and eloquently written, and brought up in every 

 case to the momentary limit of the ever-advancing tide of 

 the scientific knowledge of the age. There remain the 

 three Jamaica volumes, and if these alone had been 

 published during these five years, it may be that their 

 author's fame would have been quite as flourishing as it 

 was. These were genuine contributions, not only to 

 zoological knowledge, but to the new methods of natural 

 history, the methods which their author now so openly 

 defended. Then, of a less public character, there were 

 those technical monographs read at the Proceedings of the 

 Royal, and printed by the Linnsean and Microscopical 

 Societies, in which the new naturalist showed himself just 

 as competent and as accurate in measuring, defining, and 

 copying cabinet specimens as had been any of the old 

 closet savants whose exclusiveness he deprecated. On 

 all sides, the author of so many and so incongruous 

 writings, he had widened the field of his experience, and 

 he was now rapidly advancing along the pathway to dis- 

 tinction. A sudden event changed the entire current of 

 his being. 



The life he had led for these last five years had been 

 cloistered and uniform in the extreme. Nothing could ex- 

 ceed the monotony of his daily existence. As he became 

 better known, social opportunities had not been lacking ; 

 invitations had reached him which, had they been accepted, 

 might have led to others. But he accepted none of them. 



