“I gave my fourteenth, and last for this year, lecture with vigour
     and effect, and am safe and well (D.G.) after such a spell of work
     as I never did before.”

To another correspondent, a few days later: 

“Here are two lovely little songs for you to put tunes to, and sing to me.  You’ll have both to be ever so good to me, for I’ve been dreadfully bothered and battered here.  I’ve bothered other people a little, too,—­which is some comfort!”

But in spite of everything, the vote was passed to establish a physiological laboratory at the museum; to endow vivisection—­which to him meant not only cruelty to animals, but a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of science, and defiance of the moral law.  He resigned his Professorship, with the sense that all his work had been in vain, that he was completely out of touch with the age, and that he had best give up the unequal fight.

In former times when he had found himself beaten in his struggles with the world, he had turned to geology for a resource and a relief; but geology, too, was part of the field of battle now.  The memories of his early youth and the bright days of his boyhood came back to him as the only antidote to the distress and disappointments of his age, and he strove to forget everything in “bygones”—­“Praeterita.”

It was Professor Norton who had suggested that he should write his own life.  He had begun to tell the story, bit by bit, in “Fors.”  On the journey of 1882 he made a point of revisiting most of the scenes of youthful work and travel, to revive his impressions; but the meeting with Miss Alexander gave him new interests, and his return to Oxford put the autobiography into the background.

Now, at last he collected the scattered notes, and completed his first volume, which brings the account up to the time of his coming of age.  It is not a connected and systematic biography; it omits many points of interest, especially the steps of his early successes and mental development; but it is the brightest conceivable picture of himself and his surroundings—­“scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory,” as the title modestly puts it—­told with inimitable ease and graphic power.

We have traced a life which was—­even more than might be gathered from “Praeterita”—­a battle with adversities from the beginning.  Not to discuss the influences of heredity, there was over-stimulus in childhood; intense application to work in youth and middle-age, under conditions of discouragement, both public and private, which would have been fatal to many another man; and this, too, not merely hard work, but work of an intense emotional nature, involving—­in his view at least—­wide issues of life and death, in which he was another Jacob wrestling with the angel in the wilderness, another Savonarola imploring reconciliation between God and man.