GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 339 



his notice. In Newfoundland he had seriously begun to 

 make a collection of designs. In July, 1855, he stated (in 

 the preface to the Manual of Marine Zoology) that he had 

 up to that date accumulated in his portfolios more than 

 three thousand figures of animals or parts of animals, of 

 which about two thousand five hundred were of the in- 

 vertebrate classes, and about half of these latter done 

 under the microscope. During the remainder of his life 

 he added perhaps two thousand more drawings to his 

 collections. The remarkable feature about these careful 

 works of art was that, in the majority of cases, they were 

 drawn from the living animal. 



His zeal as a draughtsman was extraordinary. I have 

 often known him return, exhausted, from collecting on 

 the shore, with some delicate and unique creature secured 

 in a phial. The nature of the little rarity would be such 

 as to threaten it with death within an hour or two, even 

 under the gentlest form of captivity. Anxiously eyeing 

 it, my father would march off with it to his study, and, 

 not waiting to change his uncomfortable clothes, soaked 

 perhaps in sea-water, but adroitly mounting the captive 

 on a glass plate under the microscope, would immediately 

 prepare an elaborate coloured drawing, careless of the 

 claims of dinner or the need of rest. His touch with the 

 pencil was rapid, fine, and exquisitely accurate. His eye- 

 sight was exceedingly powerful, and though he used spec- 

 tacles for many years, and occasionally had to resign for 

 a while the use of the microscope, his eyes never wore out, 

 and showed extraordinary recuperative power. He was 

 drawing microscopic rotifers, with very little less than his 

 old exactitude and brilliancy, after he had entered his 

 seventy-eighth year. 



In A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast 

 (1853) he first began to adorn his books with those beau- 



