Walter Frank Raphael Weldou. 1860—1906. 
27 
years of discouragement and much hard labour, Weldon succeeded in demonstrating 
that natural selection was really at work, and further that it was at work at a very 
sensible rate*. The labour involved was excessive. One "crabbery" consisted of 
500 wide-mouthed bottles, each with two syphons for a constant flow of sea water, 
and each crab had to be fed daily and its bottle cleaned. During the summer of 
1897 Weldon spent the whole of his days at the aquarium, and his wife hardly left 
him except to fetch the needful chop. The sewage experiment was "horrible from 
the great quantity of decaying matter necessary to kill a healthy crab." In 1898 
the china clay experiments were continued at Plymouth. But in the autumn a rest 
came. The Address was written and Weldon thoroughly enjoyed his presidency of 
Section D of the British Association at Bristol. 
It may not be out of place here to note the great aid Weldon's artistic instinct 
and literary training gave to his scientific expression. His papers are models of 
clear exposition, his facts are well marshalled, his phraseology is apt, his argu- 
ments are concise, and his conclusions tersely and definitely expressed. The result, 
however, was not reached without much labour. I do not mean that it was an 
effort to him to write well and clearlj', but that his standard was so high, that 
having written a memoir, he would to please his own sense of the fitting rewrite 
the whole of it and possibly redraw all the diagrams. Nor was the remodelled 
memoir necessarily in its final form. A third or fourth reconstruction might follow 
to satisfy his own standard of right expression. To him a paper was a literary 
whole, which had not only to convey new facts, but to play its part on the scientific 
stage, — and he was not satisfied until it was in his judgment artistically complete. 
There was never any artificial brilliancy introduced in the process ; rhetoric in the 
service of science was intolerable to Weldon. It was simply an attempt to choose 
the suitable form and the right words for a given purpose. It was comparable 
with Weldon's sense of sound, with his extraordinary gift of appreciating and 
reproducing the exact intonation of a foreign tongue. Both were the result of 
observation and experiment — not manifest in the final product — guided by a 
trained artistic sense. 
Considerable changes were soon to take place in Weldon's environment and 
scheme of work. Lankester had been appointed director to the British Museum 
(Natural History), and in February, 1899, Weldon succeeded him in the Linacre 
Professorship at Oxford. In the February of 1897 the Royal Society Evolution 
Committee received a large increase of membership ; it ceased henceforth to 
"conduct statistical inquiries into the measurable characteristics of plants and 
animals." It became transformed into an Evolution (Plants and Animals) Com- 
mittee. At first there were great hopes of achievement, there was a possibility of 
securing Charles Darwin's house as a centre for breeding experiments, and a 
considerable sum of money was promised in aid. Francis Galton struggled bravely 
for a great idea. He wanted to see the numerous bodies engaged in horticulture 
* The 60,000,000 years or so, which the physicist then allowed the evolutionist, were at that time 
a little more of an incubus than they are now ! 
4—2 
