MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 5D 
History in all its departments.” He was, we are told, a gentle 
and sweet-tempered child, and probably his keenest interests 
were in the living things and wild nature around him. He 
must have been very unlike most boys of his age, and so was 
lable to be misunderstood and unappreciated. It is recorded 
that his grandmother Teare, seeing him grubbing for snails 
in a hedge, said (in Manx) :—“ Ta mee credjal naugh vod 
slane Ellan Vannin sauail yn guilley shoh veich cheet dy ve 
ommydan” (=I believe the whole Isle of Man cannot save 
this boy from being a fool). 
He was at school for a few years at Douglas where he 
is described as never having his pencil out of his hand, and 
as covering his books and exercises and the margins of his 
- Latin verses with sketches of animals and caricatures and fancy 
pictures of all kinds. 
Then he left home for good at the age of seventeen. His 
mother had hoped he would enter the Church, his father 
wished him to be a doctor. As a compromise he went to 
London to study Art! Although exceedingly clever with 
his pencil, as the illustrations in many of his books abundantly 
testify, four months in London convinced him that he could 
never be a professional artist, and he then decided to fall 
in with his father’s wishes and study medicine in Edinburgh. 
It is of interest to note that at that time (1831) it took three 
days to travel from London to the Isle of Man and another 
three from there to Edinburgh. 
We hear most about two of the professors during his 
earliest years at Edinburgh—Graham and Jameson. Graham 
was Professor of Botany, and it is said to have been a matter 
of dispute amongst his students whether it was six or seven 
diagrams that illustrated his course of lectures. The microscope 
was unknown, and the only practical work consisted in collecting 
flowers and pulling them apart with the fingers. Jameson, 
who united Geology and Zoology, was a celebrated man, 
