Memoir of the Rev. Leonard Blome/leld. 34)9 



Mr Blomefield. Out of the treasures of his stored knowledge 

 he would often contribute a paper at the meetings of scientific 

 societies. On 14th May 1891 he read a paper before the 

 Selborne Society at its annual meeting, under the presidency 

 and hospitality of Mr Skrine, at Claverton Manor. The title 

 was " Eecords of a Rookery." He did the same before the 

 Bath Field Club so lately as November 1891. But the keenness 

 of his quest had long passed from scientific details into that 

 more ethereal region where lies the borderland between Science 

 and Faith. In the mind of every intellectual man there are 

 two faculties by which he reaches after truth ; there is the 

 instinctive and there is the systematic. The one grasps truth 

 with the affection of natural sympathy, because of its affinity to 

 the honest mind. The other with the processes of induction and 

 ratiocination. The grand aim is to reconcile these and to induce 

 them to give one verdict ; but that aim is seldom realised. In 

 the subject of our memoir both these faculties were in full 

 exercise, neither of them atrophied by neglect, and this very 

 circumstance made the endeavour, after union, a more arduous 

 pursuit. 



It was at Cambridge that his mind had been opened, that 

 he first tasted the charm of scientific truth, that he made his 

 earliest and most cherished friendships ; and he would willingly 

 talk of Cambridge and of Cambridge memories, and he talked 

 of them too in a way that did one good to listen to. In his 

 scientific reasonings, in his estimate of the power and value of 

 induction and demonstration, in his exigent demand for rigid 

 proof in argumentative discourse, he was quite the proverbial 

 Cambridge man. His education had been wholly scientific, and 

 though he had a competent knowledge of Latin and Greek, his 

 knowledge of literature was not at all commensurate with his 

 attainments in science. Like his friend, Charles Darwin, he 

 could take no delight in poetry or in the creations of imaginative 

 thought. And this was a real drawback to him in those higher 

 speculations to which he became attached in later life. For he 

 had little readiness in applying those analogies of nature and 

 revelation which are fruitful, not indeed, of demonstration, but 

 of high degrees of that probability which Bishop Butler has 

 declared to be the guide of life. And this it is which makes 

 his last work, "The Life of the World to Come," the more 

 remarkable from the extent to which it pushes analogy ; 



