LAST YEARS. 317 



threatening to be very expensive to reproduce. My 

 father, however, met with great kindness on this occasion 

 from his younger confreres. The manuscript was finally, 

 in March, 1882, submitted by Professor Michael Foster to 

 the council of the Linnaean Society for publication, the 

 Royal Society offering £50 towards the expense of printing 

 and engraving. The Linnaean Society, thereupon, waiving 

 their usage of not publishing papers which had been read 

 elsewhere, undertook to bring it out, and, to my father's 

 extreme gratification, this child of his old age was finally 

 issued in May, 1883, as a handsome quarto, in the form of 

 the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, and with all his 

 plates carefully reproduced in lithography. 



Philip Gosse had made it an invariable practice, in 

 advancing life, to qualify every public expression of his 

 views on natural phenomena by an attribution of the 

 beautiful or wonderful condition to the wisdom of the 

 Divine Creator. He had done so in his monograph on 

 The Clasping Organs ancillary to Generation, appending to 

 that memoir a paragraph embodying those pious reflec- 

 tions which his conscience conceived to be absolutely de 

 rigueur. Rightly or wrongly, these sentiments appeared 

 to the council of the Linnaean Society to be out of place 

 in a very abstruse description of certain organs, which are 

 curious, but neither beautiful nor calculated to inspire 

 ideas of a particularly elevating nature. In sending to 

 him the proof of his memoir, the secretary was directed 

 to ask the author, in making some other trifling excisions, 

 to be kind enough to put his pen through this little 

 passage also. To the surprise of every one concerned, he 

 absolutely declined to do this. The council was then 

 placed in a most embarrassing position. A great deal of 

 money had already been. spent, and here was a paragraph 

 which could not be issued, by the rules of the society, 



