XXV 



stayed for some little time in Switzerland, and apparently then was first 

 taken with the love of Alpine climbing, though it was not till the 

 summer of 1880 that he made any difficult ascents. The fondness for 

 this exercise, the beneficial effects of which on his health were most 

 striking and encouraging, grew upon him in the following years. In the 

 summer of 1881 he passed some weeks in Switzerland, in company with 

 his brother, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and by his feats on that occasion placed 

 himself at once in the front rank of Alpine climbers. In the summer 

 of 1882 he thought, and even the most cautious of his friends thought 

 with him, that the Alpine air and mode of life would remove the last 

 traces of weakness which the typhoid fever had left behind, and in 

 June he started, full of spirits, for Switzerland. After some two or three 

 weeks or so of climbing, during which he felt his strength quite come 

 back, the old remedy acting with its usual charm, he set off from 

 Courmayeur, with his guide, Johann Petrus, on Tuesday, July 18, to 

 ascend the neighbouring Aiguille Blanche, a hitherto virgin peak. 

 But he never came back alive. On the following Sunday an exploring 

 party found his remains and those of his guide lying high up on the 

 mountains at the foot of a couloir. The exact time and manner of his 

 death will never be known, but it is probable that the fatal fall took 

 place on Wednesday, the 19th ; it is almost certain that death was 

 instantaneous, and it is the opinion of some that in the accident the 

 guide fell first and carried Balfour with him. The body was brought 

 home to England and buried at Whittinghame. 



To describe in a few words Balfour's contributions to biological 

 science is a difficult or rather an impossible task, for brief as was his 

 life, his active brain had traversed a large and varied area of thought 

 and observation. The leading idea which guided him in all his work 

 was to use the facts of embryology to explain the development of 

 animal life, to make the evolution of the individual throw light on the 

 evolution of races and kinds. This idea was of course no new one ; 

 indeed it has guided nearly all morphological inquiries since Darwm's 

 labours, as, in a way, it did some before. But it was Balfour's distin- 

 guishing feature and merit that while his lively imagination opened 

 up to him all manner of bold views and striking hypotheses, a strict 

 logical sense forbade him to confound a mere possible or likely sug- 

 gestion with a proven truth. The value of his work lay in this, that 

 when he had conceived an idea he left no means untried to test its 

 worth, and the charm of his writings consists as well in the clear 

 and strong way in which he lays down proofs of the things which he 

 considered proven, as in the frank candour with which he sets forth 

 the difficulties of a probable, but as yet uncertain, opinion. 



Perhaps the most striking and complete of his works is that in 

 which in a masterly way he furnished adequate proof of the view 

 (which had occurred to others as well as himself) that the urogenital 



