GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 335 



till night. On the first day of his seventy-eighth year, he 

 wrote to me in these terms : — 



" My health is fair and my vigour considerable. I am 



" free from pains and infirmities. My zest and delight 



"in my microscopical studies is unabated yet, so that 



" every day is an unflagging holiday." 



This description of his feelings, at a time when the 1 

 shadow of death had almost crossed his path, is significant, 

 and might be taken to characterize his inward feeling, if 

 not always his outward aspect, through the main part of 

 the last thirty years of his life. He could even, on occasion, 

 be merry, with a playfulness that was almost pathetic, 

 because it seemed to be the expression of a human 

 sympathy buried too far down in his being to reveal itself 

 except in this dumb way. I cannot exactly describe what 

 it was that made this powerfully built and admirably 

 equipped man sometimes strike one as having the im- 

 matureness and touching incompleteness of the nature of 

 a child. It was partly that he was innocent of observing 

 any but the most obvious and least complex working of 

 the mind in others. But it was mainly that he had nothing 

 in common with his age. He was a Covenanter come into 

 the world a couple of centuries after his time, to find society 

 grown too soft for his scruples and too ingenious for his 

 severe simplicity. He could never learn to speak the / 

 ethical language of the nineteenth century ; he was seven- J' 

 teenth century in spirit and manner to the last. 



No question is more often put to me regarding my 

 father than this — How did he reconcile his religious to his 

 scientific views? The case of Faraday may throw some 

 light, but not very much, upon the problem. The word 

 " reconcile " is scarcely the right one, because the idea of 

 reconciliation was hardly entertained by my father. He 

 had no notion of striking a happy mean between his 



