I must not, however, underestimate the very prominent part taken all through this spring and summer of 1858 by the collection of specimens on the seashore.  My Father had returned, the chagrin of his failure in theorizing now being mitigated, to what was his real work in life, the practical study of animal forms in detail.  He was not a biologist, in the true sense of the term.  That luminous indication which Flaubert gives of what the action of the scientific mind should be, affranchissant esprit et pesant les mondes, sans haine, sans peur, sans pitie, sans amour et sans Dieu, was opposed in every segment to the attitude of my Father, who, nevertheless, was a man of very high scientific attainment.

But, again I repeat, he was not a philosopher; he was incapable, by temperament and education, of forming broad generalizations and of escaping in a vast survey from the troublesome pettiness of detail.  He saw everything through a lens, nothing in the immensity of nature.  Certain senses were absent in him; I think that, with all his justice, he had no conception of the importance of liberty; with all his intelligence, the boundaries of the atmosphere in which his mind could think at all were always close about him; with all his faith in the Word of God, he had no confidence in the Divine Benevolence; and with all his passionate piety, he habitually mistook fear for love.

It was down on the shore, tramping along the pebbled terraces of the beach, clambering over the great blocks of fallen conglomerate which broke the white curve with rufous promontories that jutted into the sea, or, finally, bending over those shallow tidal pools in the limestone rocks which were our proper hunting-ground,—­it was in such circumstances as these that my Father became most easy, most happy, most human.  That hard look across his brows, which it wearied me to see, the look that came from sleepless anxiety of conscience, faded away, and left the dark countenance still always stern indeed, but serene and unupbraiding.  Those pools were our mirrors, in which, reflected in the dark hyaline and framed by the sleek and shining fronds of oar-weed there used to appear the shapes of a middle-aged man and a funny little boy, equally eager, and, I almost find the presumption to say, equally well prepared fog business.

If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realize at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost.  There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much.  Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weedcurtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, grange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.