CHILDHOOD. 27 



of the house now occupied by John Brown's mother they 

 turned into a studio and workroom. John was me- 

 chanical, Philip inclined to the arts, both were equally 

 bookish. One experiment of theirs mildly foreshadowed 

 a famous invention of our own day. Philip contrived to 

 make an acoustic tube of the rain-spout that led from a 

 gutter within the parapet of his mother's house all down 

 the front of the house to the street, and into this sort of 

 speaking-tube, the speaker being concealed close beneath the 

 roof, he used to breathe prophetic utterances, which rose 

 as if from the pavement, to the alarm of mystified passers- 

 by. But the serious amusement or main studious enter- 

 tainment of the boys was zoology. From every available 

 source they added to their knowledge of natural history, 

 eagerly reading up for the dimensions, colours, postures, 

 and habits generally of the principal quadrupeds and birds. 

 This, with incessant copying of cuts and plates of animals, 

 could not fail to give them both a solid substratum of 

 zoological knowledge. 



At sixteen they were children still, unsophisticated, 

 bashful, and ignorant of the world, far more interested in 

 such a show as Sir Ashton Lever's travelling exhibition 

 of natural history than in any public events or local 

 politics. It was the collection which I have just mentioned 

 which first awakened in Philip Gosse one of the master 

 passions of his life, a love of exotic lepidoptera. The 

 Lever Museum contained one of the grand silver-blue 

 butterflies of South America, — it was probably Morpho 

 Menelaus — and this created an extraordinary longing in 

 the boy's heart to go out and capture such imperial 

 creatures for himself. It was outside this show that was 

 exhibited the portrait of a mermaid, " radiant in feminine 

 loveliness and piscine scaliness." But the boy had studied 

 his zoology with far too much care to be deceived for one 



