Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. 1860—1906. 
29 
extent, but were very varied in character. In 1893, Easter was spent in the 
Sieben Gebirge ; the Weldons were up at six, calcuUiting till one, and starting a 
great tramp at two, from which they returned at eight. The autumn they spent 
in Venice, going by sea, and the Christmas at Brussels, with opera each night and 
walks to Waterloo most days. In 1894 it was Siena for the Palio, with a knapsack 
tour from Stresa to Alagna by Orta and Varallo. In 1895 Easter found them 
fossil-collecting in the Eiffel, and, after the hard summer at Plymouth, in the 
Apennines, winding up in Florence. Bicycling was the rule in 1890, even cycling 
from Wimpole Street to Plymouth, and the only holiday a cycling tour in 
Normandy. In 1897 there was an Easter visit with architectural sketching to the 
cathedrals of North-East France, and after the specially hard summer at Plymouth 
a trip to Perugia and a return from Genoa by sea. The last year in London 
included a butterfly and moth collecting expedition to Ravenna at Easter, but no 
summer holiday abroad ; the British Association, followed by a study of Wells 
Cathedral, occupied its place. The restlessness of work seemed to have overflowed 
into the holidays, and Weldon's friends knew that it was telling upon him, and 
trusted that Oxford life might be quieter than the London life had been. 
VI. Oxford and the Second Professoriate, 1900 — 1906. 
The removal of Weldon from the London field of work, while an incalculable 
loss to his colleagues, was not without compensation to his nearest friends. They 
knew that the life of the last few years had been one of great tension, that 
Weldon's time had been too much encroached upon by committee work, that the 
separation between the locus of his teaching and of his research woi'k was very 
undesirable, that even the social life of London involved too much expense of 
energy. Oxford, in some respects, would present a narrower field of administrative 
duties ; it would provide a roomy and amply equipped laboratory, where 
experiments hitherto shared between Plymouth and Gower Street could be carried 
out, and remain under control while ordinary teaching work was going forward. 
Even the social life in Oxford had more regular hours and was less over-stimulating. 
It is true that Weldon occasionally regretted the contact with many minds working 
on kindred topics, and even the stimulus of keen men working on quite different 
subjects, which is characteristic of the metropolis. He would speak with great 
affection of " dear old Gower Street, where everybody was working and everybody 
wanted to work " — and he would be vexed that so many of " these nice Oxford 
boys" had no ?'es angusta domi to force them from the river and the playing field 
into the laboratory and the lecture room. " They are so nice, they come to my 
lectures because they think it would be rude to leave me alone." The lad who 
would not make a sacrifice to his love of science — accept an Asiatic appointment of 
the merest bread and butter value, or take passage in a tramp steamer to collect in 
South America — was anathema to him. He wanted everywhere an infant Huxley, 
realising the value of tropical or semi-tropical observation and experience and 
anxious to seize the opportunity of it at any slight personal inconvenience. 
Weldon did not grasp that it was largely his own personality which had created 
