1 866.] 



HIS SCHOOL. 



289 



He had not made it a condition of his gift, that he should 

 have the arrangement of it ; though it was his suggestion : the 

 name given to it was not at his wish. He wrote to Mr. Robson 

 (January 2, 1868) : " The College has accepted my shells, and 

 will build a fire-proof wing for them. So now I am denuded of 

 what I always loved more than money ; but it is good to lose 

 treasures, and my disposition of them is, I think, the most 

 useful." 



In September, 1866, he opened a " West-end Select School' 7 

 for twenty day scholars. " A few years ago," he wrote, " I 

 should have liked my teaching-life very much \ but my various 

 powers have left me rapidly of late : and I hardly feel compe- 

 tent to manage these unruly urchins : even my voice is getting 

 very weak, and I am obliged to take great care lest it fail me 

 altogether." The boys were of a different nature from his 

 Warrington pupils : ' ' full of excitement, with the least possible 

 * grain of attention and application. The only weapons I have 

 to fight them are patience, quiet, and firmness, and the monthly 

 report." Notwithstanding school troubles, he liked " warm 

 live boys better than cold dead shells," which, however, often 

 supplied him with quiet and soothing occupation. In reply to 

 an offer of classical and mathematical books, he says that he is 

 parting with his own classics : — " I shall never be Professor of 

 Classics at any College : it is not my forte : and I shall never 

 read any classics for my amusement, except my favourite 

 Tacitus, whom I always intend to read when I am old or 

 ill. . . . With regard to mathematical books, the case is 

 different. It was always my forte more than Natural History : 

 and if a comfortable berth of Professor of Mathematics should 

 turn up, I shall probably try for it." None such offered ; but, 

 a few months after, he was sounded as to his acceptance of 

 a Professorship of Natural History at the new Cornell Univer- 

 sity, at Ithaca, N.Y. Its advantages were — a comfortable 

 maintenance, and easy work ; but he knew that he should be 

 " always busy at something : " he felt the sanitary work a tie to 

 Montreal : he thought that " young Yankees " would not be so 

 congenial to him as Canadian boys : and he and his wife had 



u 



