MEMOIR 
2 3 
may be remarked, was considerably less than that of any of 
the other five candidates. On January 12, 1887, however, 
the same official informs him that he is elected to the 
Melbourne Chair. Exactly a week later he is married to 
Mary Elizabeth Bowman at Hatherlow Congregational 
Church, by the Rev. Dr. Powicke, father of the present 
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford; and after 
the lapse of a bare month the happy couple leave England 
for the Antipodes. That the lady in question was helping 
him some months before to colour fifteen hundred litho¬ 
graphed plates by hand in order to illustrate an article that 
he was publishing is a fact that assumes deep significance in 
the light of this romantic sequel. 
At this point the hero of this sketch recedes beyond the 
horizon of Oxford and of his present biographer; for, 
although I eventually visited him in Victoria, he was by that 
time able to look back on achievements many and various, 
the antecedent conditions of which are not intimately 
grasped from a distance. For the matter of that, Spencer 
himself could not at once readjust his angle of vision. He 
writes in July from Australia; ‘We feel dreadfully exiled . . . 
Our longings are simply to get back to the old country with 
its friends and familiar places.’ Nor did Spencer ever forget 
his Oxford days. Thus, much later on, he writes to Balfour 
from Melbourne: 
‘It seems ages ago since you and Bourne and Sclater and little Pode 
and Tommy Roth and myself were working in the old lab., but it was 
a very pleasant time, and I wish that those of us who yet remain in the 
flesh could meet together for an evening’s confab. ... If we had a long 
enough notice, the original members of the “science club” of 1885 or 
1886 might come together. Think this over, and if you can possibly 
arrange for such a meeting, I will “by hook or crook be present. 
Fortunately, by Dr. Bourne’s kindness, a photographic 
group is reproduced here which contains many of Spencer’s 
