42 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



which I gradually acquired confidence in my own judgment, 

 so that in dealing with any body of facts bearing upon a 

 question in dispute, if I clearly understood the nature of the 

 facts and gave the necessary attention to them, I would 

 always draw my own inferences from them, even though I 

 had men of far greater and more varied knowledge against 

 me. Thus I have never hesitated to differ from Lyell, 

 Darwin, and even Spencer, and, so far as I can judge, in all 

 the cases in which I have so differed, the weight of scientific 

 opinion is gradually turning in my direction. In reasoning 

 power upon the general phenomena of nature or of society, 

 I feel able to hold my own with them ; my inferiority consists 

 in my limited knowledge, and perhaps also in my smaller 

 power of concentration for long periods of time. 



With Huxley also I felt quite on an equality when deal- 

 ing with problems arising out of facts equally well known to 

 both of us ; but wherever the structure or functions of animals 

 were concerned, he had the command of a body of facts so 

 extensive and so complex that no one who had not devoted 

 years to their practical study could safely attempt to make 

 use of them. I therefore never ventured to infringe in any 

 way on his special departments of study, though I occa- 

 sionally made use of some of the results which he so lucidly 

 explained. 



One of my near neighbours while I lived in London was 

 Dr. W. B. Carpenter, the well-known physiologist and micro- 

 scopist, and a voluminous writer on various branches of natural 

 science. I often called on him in the evening, when I usually 

 found him at work with his microscope, and he always took 

 pleasure in showing me some special structure or some 

 obscure organism, and explaining the nature of what I saw. 

 The great controversy was then at its height as to the alleged 

 animal nature of a substance found in the Laurentian forma- 

 tion of Canada, supposed to be the oldest of all the stratified 

 rocks. Dr. Carpenter maintained that it was a low form of 

 Foraminifera, a group of which he had made a special study. 

 This supposed organism had been named by Sir William 



