All this had its absurd side, but I seem to perceive that it had also its value.  It is, surely, a mistake to look too near at hand for the benefits of education.  What is actually taught in early childhood is often that part of training which makes least impression on the character, and is of the least permanent importance.  My labours failed to make me a zoologist, and the multitude of my designs and my descriptions have left me helplessly ignorant of the anatomy of a sea-anemone.  Yet I cannot look upon the mental discipline as useless.  It taught me to concentrate my attention, to define the nature of distinctions, to see accurately, and to name what I saw.  Moreover, it gave me the habit of going on with any piece of work I had in hand, not flagging because the interest or picturesqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing forth towards a definite goal, well foreseen and limited beforehand.  For almost any intellectual employment in later life, it seems to me that this discipline was valuable.  I am, however, not the less conscious how ludicrous was the mode in which, in my tenth year, I obtained it.

My spiritual condition occupied my Father’s thoughts very insistently at this time.  Closing, as he did, most of the doors of worldly pleasure and energy upon his conscience, he had continued to pursue his scientific investigations without any sense of sin.  Most fortunate it was, that the collecting of marine animals in the tidal pools, and the description of them in pages which were addressed to the wide scientific public, at no time occurred to him as in any way inconsistent with his holy calling.  His conscience was so delicate, and often so morbid in its delicacy, that if that had occurred to him, he would certainly have abandoned his investigations, and have been left without an employment.  But happily he justified his investigation by regarding it as a glorification of God’s created works.  In the introduction of his Actinologia Britannica, written at the time which I have now reached in this narrative, he sent forth his labours with a phrase which I should think unparalleled in connection with a learned and technical biological treatise.  He stated, concerning that book, that he published it ’as one more tribute humbly offered to the glory of the Triune God, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working’.  Scientific investigation sincerely carried out in that spirit became a kind of weekday interpretation of the current creed of Sundays.

The development of my faculties, of which I have spoken, extended to the religious sphere no less than to the secular, Here, also, as I look back, I see that I was extremely imitative.  I expanded in the warmth of my Father’s fervour, and, on the whole, in a manner that was satisfactory to him.  He observed the richer hold that I was now taking on life; he saw my faculties branching in many directions, and he became very anxious to secure my maintenance in