June 12, 1885. 



SCIENCE 



487 



his eighteenth year. He seems to have been 

 unusually boyish for his age. A contemporar} T 

 records l ' how young he was in every wa} r , be- 

 ginning at first sight to tell with schoolboy 

 frankness all about his stucly at Sheffield, how 

 he furnished it, how the boy next him had 

 died, and how he had read all his Greek plays." 

 The master of Pembroke did not trouble him- 

 self concerning the unsophistication of his new 

 scholar. He said, " He is a clever Yorkshire- 

 man ; and, when a Yorkshire-man is clever, he 

 is clever." 



In 1850 Eolleston graduated with a first class 

 in classics, and next year he was elected a 

 fellow of his college. His fellowship was only 

 tenable on the condition that he should graduate 

 in medicine within a certain period. Oxford 

 affording at that time even less opportunity 

 than now for medical studies, he went to St. 

 Bartholomew's hospital in London. After com- 

 pleting his professional course he worked with 

 notable success for a time in the English hos- 

 pital at Smyrna, towards the close of the Cri- 

 mean war. In 1857 we find him settled in 

 London, and assistant physician to the hospi- 

 tal for sick children. Extracts from letters 

 written at this period show him entirely de- 

 voted to his work, and interested not merely 

 in his little patients, but endeavoring to pro- 

 mote the welfare of their parents. "I see a 

 good deal of the London poor by this means, 

 and, though I find among them much stupidity 

 and brutishness, I nevertheless see more of 

 qualities which are estimable. Love and self- 

 denial I see constant!}', and I make it my busi- 

 ness to encourage these qualities." 



Eolleston's career was not, however, to be 

 that of a successful London physician. His 

 character, his talents, and his learning were 

 not forgotten at Oxford; nor had he lost his 

 love for his university. Before he had prac- 

 tised a 3'ear in London, the Lee's readership in 

 anatomy, and the post of assistant physician 

 to the Eadcliffe infirmary, fell vacant, and Eol- 

 leston was elected to both. For some time 

 after returning to his alma mater, he was hamp- 

 ered in the performance of his teaching duties 

 by the necessity of practising medicine to make 

 a sufficient income ; but in 1860, being then 

 in his thirty-first year, he was elected to the 

 Linacre professorship of anatomy and physi- 

 ology, just endowed by Merton college. This 

 position he held for the rest of his life. Once 

 freed from the cares and distractions of a 

 physician's life, Eolleston' s future career was 

 that of an earnest teacher and investigator, and 

 protagonist in the weary war which biology 

 had to wage in Oxford, year after year, before 



it could obtain an}- standing in the university 

 less galling than a begrudged and contempt- 

 uous tolerance. 



When Eolleston was appointed Linacre pro- 

 fessor, the Oxford museum was being organized 

 against much opposition, partly on financial 

 grounds, but mainly because a powerful group 

 of university leaders had aroused the senti- 

 ment that natural phenomena should only be 

 studied from an artistic or emotional stand- 

 point. The beliefs of this group were, that 

 there was something degrading, if not abso- 

 lutely obscene, in the study of the bare facts 

 of anatomy and physiology ; that skulls of early 

 races of mankind were disagreeable objects, 

 which no well-bred person would ever look at 

 but through the semi-translucent atmosphere of 

 history and poetry ; that organic nature could 

 never interest any one possessing refined feel- 

 ings, except when a hazy glamour had been 

 thrown around it by the discoloration and dis- 

 tortion of naked facts by mental spectacles 

 of ' sweetness and light ; ' that the objective 

 study of the question, how man came to live, 

 and move, and have his being, was not only 

 irreligious (which might be pardoned) , but un- 

 gentlemanly, and therefore inexcusable. The 

 forces and feelings against which Eolleston had 

 to contend, are hard to picture in imagination 

 now, but they were then very real and vigor- 

 ous. Ten years after the foundation of the 

 Linacre professorship, an Oxford man told us 

 that all the natural-science students in Oxford 

 called themselves mathematicians ; and even 

 mathematicians were regarded with contempt 

 by the average undergraduate, whose boyish 

 aestheticism led him to gently coo that ' cul- 

 ture ' was all in all, and literature its only road. 

 Against this sentiment Eolleston had to work. 

 He had personally experienced that a student 

 who intended to adopt the profession of medi- 

 cine was heavily handicapped if he gave up 

 three or four years of his life, after leaving 

 school, to the sole study of Greek and Latin. 

 As one excelling in classical scholarship, and 

 skilled ' in all the learning of the Egyptians,' 

 he could command a respectful hearing, even 

 from the most conservative supporters of the 

 eighteenth century Oxford curriculum. His 

 indisputable excellence as a scholar, his elo- 

 quence, his energy, his executive ability, his 

 genial nature, his universally recognized hon- 

 esty of purpose, and hatred of all sham or 

 subterfuge, enabled him to do what, perhaps, 

 no other man of his time could have done ; 

 namely, obtain at Oxford a tolerably fair rec- 

 ognition of the value and importance of bio- 

 logical study. 



