104 DR. SHIPLEY'S REMINISCENCES 



Yet he was open to argument, and without professing 

 to study or to care much about the newer aspects of his 

 subjects, he invariably helped them forward. It is 

 characteristic of his liberahty of thought that when 

 some years before his death he nominated a deputy to 

 give his formal lectures, he chose William Bateson, the 

 brilliant prophet of Mendelianism, a subject the Professor 

 was uninterested in and probably mistrusted. He was, 

 in fact, a mid- Victorian zoologist, very painstaking, 

 quite ijnusually accurate, old-fashioned in some ways, 

 but we must never forget that he was one of the first of 

 the zoologists of repute to accept and champion the 

 views of Charles Darwin. 



When I was a student his two courses of lectures . 

 were on Darwinism and on the Geographical Distribution 

 of Animals. I don't think Newton lUsed lecturing. In 

 the affairs of ordinary life he did not seem shy, but he 

 did seem shy about lecturing. To begin with, he chose 

 the uncomfortable hour of 1 p.m. I once also had to 

 lecture for two or three years at that unhappy hour, 

 and meeting at some social function a Girton lady who 

 came to hear me, I apologised to h.er for frequently 

 stopping before 2 p.m. on the ground of hunger, " Oh," 

 she said, " we had always assumed that you'd lunched," 

 and she seemed to think her or the other ladies' assump- 

 tion as satisfactory to me as a mutton chop. 



Newton's lectures were desperately dry and very 

 formal. The Professor sat before a reading desk and 

 read every word of the discourse from a written manu- 

 script, written in his minute hand with a broad quill, 

 so that all the letters looked the same, like the Burmese 

 script. At long intervals there was drawn the outhne 

 of a tumbler, like the wine-glasses which used to indicate 

 in the foreign " Bradshaws " those railway stations 

 which boasted of the existence of refreshment-rooms. 



