47 



The mental power which he possessed had been carefully 

 trained and cultured by himself. He had a good knowledge of 

 languages, exceptionally wide reading, a nice judgment in 

 literature, and a cultivated taste in art and music. He had a 

 remarkable power of visualising and mapping out mentally the 

 things and places of which he read. Few men have better possessed 

 the faculty of tearing the heart out of the literature of a subject. 

 When he started an investigation he went into it armed with a 

 thorough knowledge of all that had been said and written, and 

 with a critical appreciation of the value of each part of it. 



He acquired the gift of clear and incisive writing, and a style 

 which appeared easy and free, though it was often the result of 

 laborious correction and revision. He held that scientific writing 

 should be as clear as scientific thinking, and that it was the duty 

 of a writer both to speak unequivocally and to spend his own 

 time rather than that of his reader. 



His historical knowledge was a part of his scientific equipment, 

 and he delighted in showing how often old principles and even 

 exploded theories were to be found dominating modern thought. 

 How the ideas of the Schools of Werner and Hutton still produced 

 cleavages in geological opinion ; how Murchison starting out to 

 break up the ' Transition Greywacke ' into subdivisions gradually 

 reverted to the tendency to reunite them all again into a single 

 system ; how catastrophism had not yet been eliminated from 

 our views and methods of classification ; or how the work of 

 Lyell had made possible the theories of Darwin. 



Finally we have to note the tact with which he unvaryingly 

 handled difficult matters of scientific controversy. Right through 

 his writings and his public career, his maxim was to conceal the 

 iron hand in the velvet glove, to be yielding but firm, to get what 

 he knew to be the greatest good with the minimum of friction and 

 resistance. 



It is as difficult a task to portray the complex and beautiful 

 character of the man we are considering as it has been to attempt 

 an expression of the genius which inspired his labour. It must 

 suffice to quote what he himself wrote of his friend and 

 contemporary, Linnarsson, in 1882. 



*" His intense scientific ardour gave his body but little real 

 rest. His mind and pen were never idle, and at the least sign of 

 renewed health he hurried to the field of his duties again. Absorbed 

 in the keen delights of his original research, rewarded, as it always 

 was, with almost instant and brilliant discovery, Linnarsson seems 

 never to have adequately realised the deadly nature of his disease. 

 His enthusiastic mind overbore and overtasked the weakly frame, 



* 27. p. 3. 



