6o 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



veloped until it has assumed the high intellectual pleasure of 

 roaming through God's great creation, and of confirming the 

 ancient writer's conclusion — " Lo, there is no end to it ! " 



Of all these things Jack Hampson had never heard a word. 

 Perhaps he had occasionally listened to a few joking remarks 



about Darwin and our " be- 

 ing descended from monk- 

 eys " at his father's dinner- 

 table. But his father (who 

 was anything but a wealthy 

 man these hard agricultural 

 times, although he farmed 

 his own estate) had not much 

 time for considering the dis- 

 coveries of modern science. 

 Their echoes faintly reached 

 him occasionally, but never 

 touched him seriously. Not 

 only were the times bad, but 

 his family was large, and it 

 was not without a stretch 

 that Jack was sent to Mugby 

 School, rather more than 

 twenty miles off. His brother (Jack's uncle) was better off, because 

 he had no family ; and the uncle also had more leisure, and, what is 

 more, was really a man of a literary and scientific turn of mind. 



All school-boys make friends at school. Nobody has ever ana- 

 lyzed the process of 



Fig. 6.— Scale of Gudgeon. 



friend - making among 

 boys. It is as myste- 

 rious as genuine love- 

 making. Friendships 

 — at least, boys' friend- 

 ships — are also made 

 " at first sight." Live 

 in a public school a few 

 years, and you will find 

 it out. You might just 

 as well tell a boy to 

 make friends with a cer- 

 tain other boy, as order 

 him to make love a few years later with your female selection \ 

 And yet what issues of life depend on those boyish friendships 

 made at school ! They are often more durable than marriages. 

 They survive success, disaster, and disease. Not unfrequently, 

 they are prolonged to the second and third generation. If there 



Fig. 7.— Scale or Bream. 



