GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. zyj 



where he accomplished the greatest amount of original 

 work, in the Aciiiiozoa and the Rotifera, it was impossible 

 for hypothesis of an anti-scriptural tendency to intrude, 

 and if the observations which he made were used by others 

 to support a theory inconsistent with the record of creation, 

 he was not obliged to be cognizant of any such perversion 

 of his work. He used, very modestly, to describe himself 

 as " a hewer of wood and a drawer of water " in the house 

 of science, but no biologist will on that account under- 

 rate what he has done. His extreme care in diagnosis, 

 the clearness of his eye, the marvellous exactitude of his 

 memory, his recognition of what was salient in the charac- 

 teristics of each species, his unsurpassed skill in defining 

 those characteristics by word and by pencil, his great 

 activity and pertinacity, all these combined to make Philip 

 Gosse a technical observer of unusually high rank. In the 

 article which the Saturday Review dedicated to my father 

 at the time of his death, a passage was quoted from the 

 preface to his Actinologia Britannica (1859), as giving in 

 excellent terms the principles upon which his analytical 

 labours in zoology were performed : — 



" Having often painfully felt," he there said, " in studying 

 "works similar to the present, the evil of the vagueness 

 " and confusion that too frequently mark the descriptive 

 " portions, I have endeavoured to draw up the characters 

 "of the animals which I describe, with distinctive pre- 

 "cision, and -with order. It is reported of Montagu that, 

 " in describing animals, he constantly wrote as if he had 

 " expected that the next day would bring to light some 

 " new species closely resembling the one before him ; and 

 " therefore his diagnosis can rarely be amended. Some 

 "writers mistake for precision an excessive minuteness, 

 "which only distracts the student, and is, after all, but the 

 "portrait of an individual. Others describe so loosely 



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