X LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. 



that this is not very unlike what the world of those days took 

 quite gravely in the learned quartos of Bryant and Faber. In 

 one of Miss Rolleston's letters (1837) she records that at Maltby 

 she taught Hebrew to one of her nephews, 'the very cleverest 

 boy I ever knew.' This was George Rolleston, then eight years 

 old, but who in after life did not quite reciprocate his aunt's 

 admiration. Indeed, he used to descant with humorous horror 

 on his sufferings when once introduced to a large and serious 

 evening party as the nephew of the great Miss Rolleston, the 

 authoress of ' Mazzaroth.' 



The Maltby just mentioned is a village near Rotherham in 

 Yorkshire, where the Rev. George Rolleston combined the 

 functions of squire and vicar, living at Maltby Hall; and 

 his son George was born July 30, 1829. The sisters of the 

 younger George Rolleston, the subject of this memoir, still 

 tell of their wonder at the ways of the odd clever boy, rolling 

 lazily on the hearth-rug, or with his head between his hands 

 buried in a story-book, yet all the time knowing whatever was 

 read or said, and ready with the lessons he seemed scarcely to 

 have looked at. Taught by his father, a fine classical scholar, 

 the lad is said to have been able at ten years old to read Homer 

 at sight. Some of these family stories have an interest as 

 explaining Rolleston's later life. It has been thought extra- 

 ordinary that a man whose school and college education was 

 entirely classical, should have turned into so thorough an 

 anatomist and zoologist. But in fact this was a reversion to 

 the tastes of boyhood, when at six years old, dressed in his little 

 crimson pelisse, he would go out in the snow alone to attend to 

 his duties as 'keeper,' and set the traps in the plantations round 

 the house. Brought up on Izaak Walton, White's 'Natural 

 History of Selborne,' and Stanley's ' History of Birds,' he knew 

 all the birds and their nests, and could tell them by their flight 

 at great distances. In his schoolboy days he had taken to 

 preparing skins, and setting up skeletons of mice and weasels 

 in his little room, the smell of which the inmates of the house 

 remember after half-a-century. An old servant says of him : 



