348 LIFE AT DOWN. ^ETAT. 33-45. 



" Your father was building a vast superstructure upon the 

 foundations furnished by the recognised facts of geological 

 and biological science. In Physical Geography, in Geology 

 proper, in Geographical Distribution, and in Palaeontology, he 

 had acquired an extensive practical training during the 

 voyage of the Beagle. He knew of his own knowledge the 

 way in which the raw materials of these branches of science 

 are acquired, and was therefore a most competent judge of 

 the speculative strain they would bear. That which he 

 needed, after his return to England, was a corresponding 

 acquaintance with Anatomy and Development, and their rela- 

 tion to Taxonomy and he acquired this by his Cirripede 

 work. 



" Thus, in my apprehension, the value of the Cirripede 

 monograph lies not merely in the fact that it is a very ad- 

 mirable piece of work, and constituted a great addition to 

 positive knowledge, but still more in the circumstance that it 

 was a piece of critical self-discipline, the effect of which mani- 

 fested itself in everything your father wrote afterwards, and 

 saved him from endless errors of detail. 



" So far from such work being a loss of time, I believe it 

 would have been well worth his while, had it been prac- 

 ticable, to have supplemented it by a special study of em- 

 bryology and physiology. His hands would have been 

 greatly strengthened thereby when he came to write out 

 sundry chapters of the ' Origin of Species.' But of course in 

 those days it was almost impossible for him to find facilities 

 for such work." 



No one can look at the two volumes on the recent Cirri- 

 pedes, of 399 and 684 pages respectively (not to speak of 

 the volumes on the fossil species), without being struck 

 by the immense amount of detailed work which they con- 

 tain. The forty plates, some of them with thirty figures, 

 and the fourteen pages of index in the two volumes to- 

 gether, give some rough idea of the labour spent on the 



