316 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



investigations to a length which no one who preceded him, 

 not even Dr. White, had attempted to reach. 



Among the younger zoologists of the day, few of whom 

 were personally known to my father, there was not one in 

 whose discoveries and career he took a livelier interest than 

 in those of Professor E. Ray Lankester, for whom, from 

 his earliest publications, he had predicted a course of high 

 distinction. For the judgment of this distinguished 

 observer Philip Gosse entertained an unusual respect, and 

 it was owing to his advice that the elder naturalist, in his 

 seventy-second year, started upon a course of laborious 

 investigations, which were not terminated until two years 

 later. In April, 1881, on the very evening of a day which 

 had been marked in white to the recluse by a visit from 

 Professor Lankester, Gosse noted that, "encouraged by 

 E. R. L., I have begun my monograph on the Prehensores." 

 In October of the same year he forwarded to Professor 

 Huxley, for the consideration of the council of the Royal 

 -Society, the manuscript of his volume on The Clasping 

 Organs ancillary to Generation in Certain Groups of the 

 Lepidoptera, accompanied by nearly two hundred figures, 

 exquisitely drawn under the microscope, illustrating these 

 recondite organs with such an accuracy and delicate full- 

 ness, that I have been assured that a query was raised 

 on the council of the society as to the authorship of the 

 drawings, which it was hardly possible to conceive had been 

 made by a man of between seventy and eighty. An 

 abstract of the memoir was presently read at the Royal 

 Society by Professor Huxley, in the absence of the author. 

 There arose, however, a difficulty regarding its being 

 published in full in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, 

 the subject being excessively remote from general interest, 

 even to savants, and the illustrations, which my father 

 considered essential to the intelligibility of the monograph, 



