30 Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
the band of earnest workers round him in London, and that with time it would 
be effective in more conservative Oxford. He did not realise that the over- 
stimulus of the London period, with its midnight hours and incessant interchange 
of ideas, would be better replaced by the more leisurely intellectual and more 
regulated social life of Oxford. 
There is another point which emphasises the value of this change. Weldon's 
taste, his whole emotional nature, made him essentially a field naturalist. It was 
no innate taste for figures or symbols, no pleasure in arm-chair work, which drew 
him to statistical research. Nor was it the influence of any personality. On the 
contrary, he was impelled to it by the feeling that no further progress with Darwinism 
could be made until demonstration from the statistical side was forthcoming. His 
biometric friendships arose from the direction he felt his work must take. He 
distrusted mathematicians as much as any good Mendelian might do ; they were 
persons who neither observed nor experimented, who had "a true horror of a real 
measurement." Acceptance of each stage of biometric theory could only be won 
from Weldon by a tough battle; it had first to justify its necessity, and next to 
justify its mathematical correctness. He was not drawn into actuarial work by his 
sympathies or his friendships, he was driven into it by the looseness he discei'ned 
in much biological reasoning ; he felt an impasse, which could only be surmounted 
by the stringency of mathematical logic. Those who have known Weldon 
collecting on the shore, dredging at sea. or in later days sampling ponds and wells 
for his Crustacea book, photographing snail environments in Sicily, or hunting for 
Clausilia in the woods at Risborough or Plon, realise that he was in the first place 
the open-air naturalist. If further evidence be indeed wanting, let the following 
words provide it : 
{April, 1903.] 
"Just back, and have just read your letter. I will play with the spanner and talk of it 
to-morrow. 
I did not telegraph because our office was shut. It was a great disappointment to miss you ; 
but the ride was the one thing I enjoyed out of the last three weeks. I have felt nothing like it 
since the old days when I used to lie in a fishing boat dodging the squalls off Rame Head or the 
Deadman, when we were all young and arithmetic was not yet. That is all gone. The good old 
man I used to sail with went to haul lobster pots in one of the March gales, and his boat was 
found bottom upwards. 
He was a good soul. ' Yes, my dear,' he used to say in a breeze ; ' we'll shake out all them 
reefs if you like. You'll get wet, but I'm only a fisherman and wet don't hurt me.' Then he 
would sing Devonshire songs while the water came over the gunwale, till you went on your knees 
to him to ask for at least one reef back again. 
Really, even Basingstoke railway station looked good with the squalls climbing round it. 
Ride home. It will do you no end of good. Go by Farnham, Basingstoke, not by Guildford. 
Sandro and I rode home to-day. We had no snow, and no rain, and not half the fun of Monday. 
A sober, middle-aged ride on a good road in good weather. 
Nevertheless, my head is so full of chalk-downs and clouds, and things, I can't write biometry 
to-night. Always, when I have been with the country, the feeling breaks out that the other folk 
have the best of it. The other way you live with the country and become part of it ; and you 
