320 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



" me into prominence and honour. The labour, the 

 " plan, the publication, all the drudgery, have been his ; 

 "so that to put his name prominent is only the merest 

 "justice. We have worked all through in the fullest 

 "harmony. Every line that he has written has been 

 " subjected to my severe criticism ; and, with hardly an 

 " exception, all my amendments he has implicitly adopted. 

 " I must say I admire very warmly the introduction." 

 During the years in which the volumes on The Rotifera 

 were being prepared, my father exerted himself in an in- 

 tellectual direction with the zeal of a young professional 

 man at the height of his career. He. was up at five or 

 six in the morning, and often spent eight or nine hours in 

 uninterrupted work at the microscope, merely breaking 

 through it so far as to come down from his study with 

 knitted and abstracted brows, to swallow a hasty meal in 

 silence, and then rush up again. This excess of intellectual 

 work, combined with his neglect of exercise, seemed, in the 

 face of it, to be extremely imprudent in a man approaching 

 eighty. But we could not, at that time, very distinctly 

 observe any harm done to his health, and in some ways 

 the ardent occupation seemed to keep him well. As soon 

 as the manuscript had finally gone to the printers, how- 

 ever, early in 1886, he suffered from a nervous attack of an 

 alarming nature, which appeared to point to overwork. 

 Nevertheless, his great elasticity of constitution enabled 

 him, as it seemed, entirely to recover ; and Dr. Hudson, 

 like a housewife in a fairy story, who finds fresh labour for 

 her giant to perform, set his colleague on the mitigated 

 work of helping to prepare a Supplement. This was even- 

 tually published, in 1889, by Dr. Hudson, and contained 

 the description of one hundred and fifty additional species, 

 sixty of these being new British forms discovered by Philip 

 Gosse. It completed the great work, by describing every 



