GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 337 



where he accomplished the greatest amount of original 

 work, in the Actinozoa and the Rotifera, it was impossible 

 for hypothesis of an anti-scriptural tendency to intrude, 

 and if the observations which he made were used by others 

 to support a theory inconsistent with the record of creation, 

 he was not obliged to be cognizant of any such perversion 

 of his work. He used, very modestly, to describe himself 

 as " a hewer of wood and a drawer of water " in the house 

 of science, but no biologist will on that account under- 

 rate what he has done. His extreme care in diagnosis, 

 the clearness of his eye, the marvellous exactitude of his 

 memory, his recognition of what was salient in the charac- 

 teristics of each species, his unsurpassed skill in defining 

 those characteristics by word and by pencil, his great 

 activity and pertinacity, all these combined to make Philip 

 Gosse a technical observer of unusually high rank. In the 

 article which the Saturday Review dedicated to my father 

 at the time of his death, a passage was quoted from the 

 preface to his Actinologia Britannica (1859), as giving in 

 excellent terms the principles upon which his analytical 

 labours in zoology were performed : — 



" Having often painfully felt," he there said, "in studying 

 " works similar to the present, the evil of the vagueness 

 " and confusion that too frequently mark the descriptive 

 " portions, I have endeavoured to draw up the characters 

 " of the animals which I describe, with distinctive pre* 

 " cision, and with order. It is reported of Montagu that, 

 " in describing animals, he constantly wrote as if he had 

 " expected that the next day would bring to light some 

 " new species closely resembling the one before him ; and 

 " therefore his diagnosis can rarely be amended. Some 

 " writers mistake for precision an excessive minuteness, 

 "which only distracts the student, and is, after all, but the 

 " portrait of an individual. Others describe so loosely 



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