Chapter III. Unless these misdoings could be stopped, my journey would

MEMORIES OF MY LIFE

[Illustration: _Francis Galton_]

MEMORIES OF

MY LIFE

BY

FRANCIS GALTON, F.R.S.

D.C.L., OXF.; HON. SC.D., CAMB.

HON. FELLOW TRINITY COLL., CAMBRIDGE

WITH SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

_First Published in 1908_

PREFACE

These “Memories” are arranged under the subjects to which they refer, and

only partially in chronological order. A copious list of my memoirs will

be found in the Appendix with dates attached to them. These show what

inquiries were going on at or about any specified year. The titles of

books are printed in heavy letters. They summarise, as a rule, the best

parts of the corresponding memoirs up to the dates of their publication.

Nevertheless, a considerable quantity of matter remains in the memoirs as

yet unused in that way.

It has been a difficulty throughout to determine how much to insert and

how much to omit. I have done my best, but fear I have failed through

over-omission.

The method of that most useful volume, the _Index and Epitome of the

Dictionary of the National Biography_, has been adopted, of adding to

each name the dates of birth and death. They serve for identification

and for giving a correct idea of the age of each man as compared with

those with whom he was associated. The dates are mostly taken from the

_Dictionary_, so the reader will nearly always find in that work a

biography of the person in question.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. PARENTAGE 1

II. CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD 13

III. MEDICAL STUDIES 22

IV. SHORT TOUR TO THE EAST 48

V. CAMBRIDGE 58

VI. EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN—(_map_) 83

VII. SYRIA 101

VIII. HUNTING AND SHOOTING 110

IX. SOUTH-WEST AFRICA—(_map_) 121

X. LANDS OF THE DAMARAS, OVAMPO, AND NAMAQUAS 138

XI. AFTER RETURN HOME—MARRIAGE 152

XII. “ART OF TRAVEL” 161

XIII. SOCIAL LIFE—(_medallions_) 169

XIV. GEOGRAPHY AND EAST AFRICA 198

XV. BRITISH ASSOCIATION 213

XVI. KEW OBSERVATORY AND METEOROLOGY—(_meteorological

tracings_) 224

XVII. ANTHROPOMETRIC LABORATORIES 244

XVIII. COMPOSITE PORTRAITS AND STEREOSCOPIC MAPS 259

XIX. HUMAN FACULTY 266

XX. HEREDITY 287

XXI. RACE IMPROVEMENT—(_Galtonia Candicans_) 310

APPENDIX.—BOOKS AND MEMOIRS BY THE AUTHOR 325

PRINCIPAL AWARDS AND DEGREES 331

INDEX 332

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PORTRAIT _Frontispiece_

From the Painting by C. W. FURSE, A.R.A.

PORTRAIT _Facing p._ 244

From a Photograph.

IN THE TEXT PAGE

EGYPT AND SYRIA 88

DAMARALAND 129

YEARLY MEDALLIONS 196

METEOROLOGICAL TRACINGS 237

GALTONIA CANDICANS 323

MEMORIES OF MY LIFE

CHAPTER I

PARENTAGE

Birthplace—Grandparents—Dr. Erasmus Darwin—Lunar

Society—Captain Barclay Allardice—Mrs. Schimmelpenninck

Just before the arrival of the letter in which my publisher asked me to

write the memories of my life, I happened to be reading Shakespeare’s

_Henry IV._ and laughing over Falstaff’s soliloquy after the gross

exaggerations by Justice Shallow of his own youthful performances. It

contained the sentence, “Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this

vice of lying!” Feeling the truth of his ejaculation, I headed the

first page of my memorandum-book with those words as a warning, knowing

how difficult it is to be veracious about long-past events, threads of

imagination insinuating themselves among those supplied by memory and

becoming indistinguishable from them.

Many old notebooks and letters are, however, in my possession which have

helped me; but my two latest surviving sisters, whose minds were sure

storehouses of family events, and to whom I always referred whenever I

wanted a date or particulars of a long-past fact, are now both dead,

the one at the age of ninety-three and the other at ninety-seven, each

with a clear and vigorous mind to nearly the very end of her life. I

have hardly any contemporary friends left who could aid in recalling the

circumstances of my childhood and boyhood. With rare exceptions, “All,

all are gone, the old familiar faces.”

I was born on February 16, 1822, at the Larches, near Sparkbrook,

Birmingham, with which town my father Samuel Tertius, my grandfather

Samuel John, and my great-grandfather Samuel Galton, were all closely

connected. Different members of the family had resided or were resident

at various points beyond the circumference of the town, in houses then

amidst green fields, but now overspread beyond recognition by its hideous

outskirts.

My grandfather’s place was at Duddeston, then commonly written “Dudson.”

Its gardens had been charmingly laid out by my great-grandfather and

improved by my grandfather. The house, which was once a centre of refined

entertainment, gradually lost its charm of isolation; later on, it wholly

ceased to be attractive as a residence. It was then leased by my father

to the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, because, as he remarked, no one

in his senses would live in it. It is now turned into St. Anne’s School,

with its porticoes and other outer adornments shorn off, and with its

once beautiful gardens changed into the sites of railway sidings and

gasworks. I remember it distinctly in its beauty in the year 1830, which

was two years before my grandfather’s death.

The Larches, where I was born, had some three acres of garden and field

attached to it, with other fields beyond; it was a paradise for my

childhood. Its site is now covered with small houses. The two fine

larches that flanked it gave me a love for that tree, which persists and

is still recognisably associated with its origin.

My six nearest progenitors, namely the two parents and four grandparents,

were markedly different in temperament and tastes, and they have

bequeathed very different combinations of them to their descendants. I

can only partly touch on these.

My grandfather, Samuel John Galton (1753-1832), was a scientific and

statistical man of business. He was a Fellow of the provincially famous

Lunar Society, whose members met at one another’s houses on the day and

night of the full moon, and which, though small in numbers, was so select

as to include Priestley, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Keir the chemist, Withering

the botanist, Watt, and Boulton. Full particulars of the Lunar Society

are to be found in Smiles’ Life of Boulton, and elsewhere.

I may mention that the late Sir Rowland Hill, of penny-postage fame,

told me that the event which first gave him a taste for science was the

present of a small electrical machine made to him when a boy, by my

grandfather.

Samuel John Galton was very fond of animals. He kept many bloodhounds; he

loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious little book about them in three

small volumes, with illustrations. He had a decidedly statistical bent,

loving to arrange all kinds of data in parallel lines of corresponding

lengths, and frequently using colour for distinction. My father, and

others of Samuel John Galton’s children, inherited this taste in a

greater or less degree; it rose to an unreasoning instinct in one of his

daughters. She must have been an acceptable customer to her bookbinder on

that account, as the number of expensively bound volumes that she ordered

from time to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and assigned

to some particular subject or year, is hardly credible. I begged for a

bagful of them after her death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and

have it still; the rest were destroyed. She must have collected these

costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, for she turned them to no useful

account, and rarely filled more than a single page, often not so much of

each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, with black, red,

and blue inks, employing the distinctive colours with little reason,

but rather with regard to their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not

over-wise, yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many qualities that

endeared her to her nephews and nieces.

Samuel John Galton was a successful man of business. He was a

manufacturer, and became a contractor on a large scale for the supply of

muskets to the army during the great war. Birmingham offered at that time

a good field for the business of a contractor, because its manufactories

were many and of moderate size, and central organisations were wanting.

The Soho works of Boulton and Watt for steam-engines were almost the

only large works at that time. My grandfather prospered in his business

as a “Captain of Industry,” to use the phrase applied to him in a book

treating of Birmingham. He founded a Bank to help it, which was gradually

brought to a close some few years after the war had ceased. He died in

1832, leaving a fortune of some £12,000 a year, of which about a quarter

went to each of his three sons, of whom my father was the eldest, and the

rest between his three daughters.

The Galton family had been Quakers for many generations. They came to

Birmingham from Somersetshire, in the time of my great-grandfather,

Samuel Galton (1720-1799). Some of its earlier members are buried at

Yatton. There is a hamlet in Dorsetshire called Galton, adjacent to Owre

Moigne, with which one at least of our name, and apparently a far back

relative, was connected many generations ago.

My grandmother Galton (1757-1817) was also of Quaker stock, being

daughter of Robert Barclay of Ury, a descendant of Robert Barclay

(1648-1690) “the Apologist,” as he used to be named from his work,

Barclay’s _Apology_, which, to quote the _Dictionary of National

Biography_, is the standard exposition of the tenets of his sect, of

which the essential principle is that “all true knowledge comes from

divine revelation to the heart of the individual.”

My grandmother’s half-brother, Robert Barclay Allardice (1779-1854),

commonly known as “Captain Barclay,” was a noted athlete and pedestrian,

and in later years an active agriculturist. When upwards of seventy

years old he was dining at my father’s house in Leamington, and on being

asked, while sitting at dessert, whether he still performed any feats of

strength, he asked my eldest brother, then a fully adult man of more than

12 stone in weight, to step on his hand, which he laid palm upwards on

the floor by slightly bending his body. My brother was desired to steady

himself by laying one finger on Captain Barclay’s shoulder, who thereupon

lifted and landed him on the table. I was not present at the feat, but

heard it often described by word and gesture. However, the Captain rather

strained his shoulder by performing it, as he confessed to my father

afterwards. Captain Barclay’s endurance of long continued fatigue was

exceptional to a very high degree. The memoirs of his life are well worth

reading.

My grandmother’s half-sister was wife of Hudson Gurney (1775-1864),

“antiquary and verse writer, friend of Lord Aberdeen,” to again quote the

Index to the _Dict. Nat. Biog._ He was a man of large fortune, and my two

sisters, Bessy and Emma, paid long visits to his house in St. James’s

Square, where his wife was very kind to them, and where they saw much

good London society.

My grandfather and grandmother Galton were practically Quakers all their

lives, and so was one of their daughters, but the rest of their children

fell off and joined the Established Church. Still, we saw not a little

of our Quaker relations. A story was current in our family about myself,

as a shy and naughty child, being quite subdued by the charm of Mrs. Fry

(1780-1845). She did not even look at me, but merely held out her open

hand with comfits in it, and went on speaking to others in her singularly

sweet voice. I gradually worked my way nearer to her; then she quietly

took me on her knees, where I sat for long in perfect content.

My grandparents on the other side were Darwins, my grandfather being

Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician, poet, and philosopher, and

the very reverse of an ascetic or of a Quaker. He was grandfather to

me by his second wife; and to Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882), the great

naturalist, by his first wife. His hereditary influence seems to have

been very strong. His son Charles, who died at the early age of twenty

from a dissection wound, was a medical student of extraordinary promise;

and the medical sagacity of another son, Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury,

the father of Charles R. Darwin, is amply attested. I stayed for a night

or two at the house of the latter while I was a boy and too young to form

any opinion of him worth recording; besides, I was rather awe-stricken.

My grandmother Darwin (1747-1832), the second wife of Dr. Erasmus Darwin,

was the widow of Colonel E. Sacheverel Chandos-Pole, and, judging from

her portrait when young, a lady of remarkable grace and beauty. I saw

her in her kindly old age when she lived at the Priory near Derby, but I

know little with certainty of her early life and character. She died at

the age of eighty-five, her mother at ninety-six. It is perhaps partly

through her that the exceptional longevity of my mother and her sons

and daughters has been derived. My mother died just short of ninety,

my eldest brother at eighty-nine, two sisters, as already mentioned,

at ninety-three and ninety-seven respectively; my surviving brother is

ninety-three and in good health. My own age is now only eighty-six, but

may possibly be prolonged another year or more. I find old age thus far

to be a very happy time, on the condition of submitting frankly to its

many limitations.

A half-sister of my mother married Captain, afterwards Lord Byron,

cousin and successor to the poet in the title. They were very kind to my

sisters in their schooldays and after.

Now, as to my two parents and their brothers and sisters. My father,

Samuel Tertius Galton (1783-1844), the third in descent of the name of

Samuel, was one of the most honourable and kindly of men, and eminently

statistical by disposition. He wrote a small book on currency, with

tables, which testifies to his taste. He had a scientific bent, having

about his house the simple gear appropriate to those days, of solar

microscope, orrery, telescopes, mountain barometers without which he

never travelled, and so forth. A sliding rule adapted to various uses

was his constant companion. He was devoted to Shakespeare, and revelled

in _Hudibras_; he read _Tom Jones_ through every year, and was gifted

with an abundance of humour. Nevertheless, he became a careful man of

business, on whose shoulders the work of the Bank chiefly rested in

troublous times. Its duties had cramped much of the joy and aspirations

of his early youth and manhood, and narrowed the opportunity he always

eagerly desired, of abundant leisure for systematic study. As one result

of this drawback to his own development, he was earnestly desirous of

giving me every opportunity of being educated that seemed feasible and

right. He was the eldest son.

The second son, Hubert, married a sister of Robert Barclay, the banker.

They had three daughters, who all died unmarried—two while young, the

other in advanced age.

The youngest son, John Howard, married Isabella Strutt, a lady of

considerable fortune, and built Hadzor, near Droitwich, a large house,

with much artistic taste. He enjoyed varied society, and made Hadzor an

important social centre.

My uncle Howard was father to Sir Douglas Galton, K.C.B. (1822-1899), an

eminent authority on engineering, sanitation, and much else. Sir Douglas

held a record position in the examination at Woolwich for entry into the

Royal Engineers, being first in every subject (see _Dict. Nat. Biog._).

Curiously enough, though we cousins were both addicted to science, and

belonged alike to many scientific societies, and were both Secretaries of

the British Association, our paths rarely crossed, except socially, for

we were interested in quite different branches of science.

My father’s eldest sister, Mary Anne (1778-1856), was a lady of some note

as Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, more briefly known to us by repute as “Aunt

Skim.” A most unhappy feud separated her from all the rest of the family.

It is not my duty, and it would certainly give me no pleasure, to enter

into what the older members of the family conceived to have been frequent

and mischievous misrepresentations. I would rather dwell on the facts

that she was highly accomplished and handsome, and that she acquired

many fast friends, as shown in the Life of the Gurneys of Earlham and in

her own Memoirs. Also that she lived in the reputation of much sterling

piety at Bristol, and that three of my own friends, of totally different

temperaments, who knew her well, and of whom I inquired particularly,

all spoke in pleasant memory of her and her eccentric ways. They were

Prof. W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) the physiologist, J. Gwyn Jeffreys

(1809-1885), conchologist, etc., and Sir Lewis Pelly, K.C.B. (1825-1892),

Indian soldier and diplomatist. She wrote a book on Port Royal, and left

a valuable library of Port Royalist literature to Sion College, which

Mrs. Romanes told me was of great service to her in writing her recent

history of that establishment. For more, see _Dict. Nat. Biog._

I wish I could have learnt more details than I possess of another brother

of my father, Theodore Galton (1784-1810), who left England for the

grand tour, picked up many curios in Spain and Greece, and, returning in

health from the East, was placed in quarantine at Malta. The quarantine

establishment was attacked by the plague; he caught it and it killed him.

He had the highest reputation in the family for his natural gifts, mental

and bodily. There is a touching notice of him in the _Annual Register_.

My mother was A. Violetta Darwin (1783-1874). I have heard from older

friends, long since passed away, many charming stories of her as a young

bride. She, as I understand, had nothing of the Quaker temperament, but

was a joyous and unconventional girl. In her later life she formed the

centre of our family during thirty years of widowhood, after my father’s

comparatively early death at the age of sixty. She was very methodical

in her papers and accounts, and a most affectionate mother to myself.

One curious faculty of hers deserves record. It was the ease with which

she took in mentally, and afterwards reproduced in rough architectural

drawing, the arrangement of any house she knew. Her method was to fold a

strip of paper by doubling, quartering, and so on, into sixteen portions

of equal lengths, and to use this strip of paper as a sixteen-foot scale

wherewith to draw her rude but graphic plans. One of her children, my

dear sister Lucy Harriot Moilliet (1809-1848), had an exceptional faculty

for perspective drawing; she drew elaborate interiors with very little

previous instruction.

As to my other brothers and sisters, they were most diverse in character,

yet with a certain common resemblance which struck strangers. I shall

have occasion to speak more of them later on in the course of my

narrative.

The general result of the foregoing is that I acknowledge the debt to

my progenitors of a considerable taste for science, for poetry, and for

statistics; also that I seem to have received, partly through the Barclay

blood, a rather unusual power of enduring physical fatigue without

harmful results, of which there is much evidence when I was young. My

father had this power in his early manhood, and it was well marked in my

eldest brother and in others of the family. I suffer now from bronchitis

with occasional asthma, which has been traced to my great-grandfather,

Samuel Galton, and has descended in a greater or less degree through

all his children who left issue. My father had a strong constitution

otherwise, but he suffered terribly from hay asthma, which first attacked

him as a youth. I escaped fairly well from any form of it until I was

nearly eighty years old; and it is not hay that especially brings it on

now, but warm carpeted rooms. There are few apartments more pleasant to

most persons to read in than the drawing-room of the Athenæum Club; I

know of none that are now more apt to prove distressing to my throat and

lungs.

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND BOYHOOD

Sisters and brothers—Sisterly teachings—Schools at Boulogne,

Kenilworth, and Birmingham

I was born into a family of four sisters and two brothers, who were older

than myself by ages ranging from seven to fourteen years, the brothers

being all younger than the sisters. My third sister, Adele, was twelve

years my senior. She had spinal curvature, and was obliged to lie all

day on her back upon a board, and was thus cut off from the romps and

companionship of her sisters, though all were greatly attached to her.

She hailed my arrival into the world as a fairy gift, and begged hard

to be allowed to consider me as her sole ward, and in her simple way

educated herself as best she could, in order to be able to teach me.

Her idea of education at that time was to teach the Bible as a verbally

inspired book, to cultivate memory, to make me learn the merest rudiments

of Latin, and above all a great deal of English verse. This she did

effectually, and the result was that she believed, and succeeded in

making others believe, that I was a sort of infant prodigy.

There exist numerous records of my early performances, and it is certain

that I really knew at a very early age a great deal of Scott, of Milton,

and of Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and that I

delighted in what the family nicknamed “spouting” verse. In middle life

I feared that I had been an intolerable prig, and cross-questioned many

old family friends about it, but was invariably assured that I was not

at all a prig, but seemed to “spout” for pure enjoyment and without any

affectation; that I often quoted very aptly on the spur of the moment,

and that I was a nice little child. My memories become more or less

continuous from about the age of five or six, when I was trotted off to

live at a dame’s school a mile away. During these and many subsequent

years, my sister Adele had the greater share of my heart, and whenever I

was at home I stayed by her sofa-side most of the day. My other sisters

teased and petted me alternately; they were relatively too old to be

really companions.

It is curious how unchangeable characters are: my eldest sister was just,

my youngest was merciful. When my bread was buttered for me as a child,

the former picked out the butter that filled the big holes, the latter

did not. Consequently I respected the former, and loved the latter. A

memory of this trifling occurrence remained inseparably connected in my

mind with these dear sisters all my life, and I often amused them by

referring to it.

My second sister, Lucy, married before I was ten years old. She was

bright, lovable, and very original. Her house was like a second home to

me during the four years of boyhood that I spent at Birmingham. I have

indeed been fortunate in receiving the sisterly affection that has fallen

to my lot.

But I must not stop at this period of my reminiscences to speak of other

sisters than Adele, with whom my heart was then so intimately associated.

I am enormously indebted to the influence of her pious, serene, and

resolute disposition. Though she was compelled to pass the greater part

of her life lying on her back, she was so energetic in other ways, and so

capable of endurance, that she overcame difficulties that would have been

insurmountable to most women who were equally handicapped. She was active

in setting up schools and teaching the poor. She had a considerable

correspondence, and exerted a wide influence among all classes during

many years. Her natural capacity was of an unusually high order, and

many who knew her well, and whose opinions deserve respect, thought that

a slight betterment of opportunity and circumstances might have caused

her name to be as widely loved and known as those of any of our English

saints or heroines. She passed her life under an abiding sense of the

presence of God and of duty to man, without which few persons have ever

done great things. She was most unconventional in her ways, and her

remarkable courage was recognised by all the family.

She married a clergyman, the Rev. Shirley Bunbury, shortly after my

father’s death in 1844, but was left a widow soon afterwards, with one

little girl, on whom she lavished the same educational care that she had

bestowed upon myself, but with fuller knowledge. That little girl is now

in her turn a widow, with a large and grown-up family. She was married

in 1866 to John C. Baron Lethbridge of Tregeare, in Cornwall, about six

miles west of Launceston.

I think I can revive my principal feelings at that early age with fair

correctness, their change during growth seeming to have been chiefly due

to the increased range of mental prospect. The horizon of a child is very

narrow and his sky very near. His father is the supreme of beings. He has

to learn by slow degrees that there are more and more appreciable stages

between the highest and the lowest, and the number of such stages that

he can discriminate affords a good measure of his mental calibre at the

time. It was about the date of which I have been speaking that my second

brother, Erasmus, then a boy of twelve or thirteen, entered the navy, and

showed himself to us in his uniform, with the dagger or “dirk” that was

part of it. I, a child of five or so, fingered it with awe, and with my

little head full of Greeks and Trojans looked upon him as a hero, like

Achilles, and can perfectly recall my sense of increased security from

knowing that England could henceforth avail herself of his puissant arm

and terrible weapon.

I lived and throve in what was practically the country until the age

of eight, when I was sent to a school at Boulogne, whither my father

escorted me. It was erroneously supposed that I should learn French

there and acquire a good accent. What I did learn was the detestable

and limited patois that my eighty schoolfellows were compelled to speak

under penalty of a fine, and in this cruel way. There were transferable

metal labels which were called “marks,” and the boys in whose possession

these marks remained after each playtime received a bad record whose

accumulation up to a certain point entailed punishment. I rebelled with

my whole heart against the treachery encouraged by this system. A boy

with a “mark” in his pocket would sidle up and encourage you as he best

could to say a word of English, then forthwith he clapped his “mark” into

your hand, and went away rejoicing at the riddance.

The school was an old convent near to and within the Calais gate of

the upper town; the playground was the paved square of the convent, in

which we used the flat gravestones for playing marbles. It is now partly

overbuilt by the large church whose dome is conspicuous from afar.

We were daily marched off in a long row of pairs, usually for a walk

round the ramparts, sometimes to Napoleon’s Column, then in process of

building, and in the summer, not infrequently, to bathe by rocks near

the old fort. We prepared ourselves for the latter grateful occasions

by saving bread from breakfast; then, after having gathered mussels, we

spread their delicious contents on it to eat. An opportunity was then

afforded of inspecting with awe the marks of recent birchings, which were

reckoned as glorious scars. The birchings were frequent and performed

in a long room parallel to, and separated from, the schoolroom by large

ill-fitting doors, through which each squeal of the victim was heard

with hushed breaths. In that room was a wardrobe full of school-books

ready for issue. It is some measure of the then naïveté of my mind that

I wondered for long how the books could have been kept so fresh and

clean for nearly two thousand years, thinking that the copies of Cæsar’s

Commentaries were contemporary with Cæsar himself.

An occasional walk was to a wet plantation on the side of the little

river Liane, that feeds the harbour, at which one of our schoolfellows, a

gaunt, dyspeptic-looking boy, performed the following feat to our terror

and admiration, as we crowded round him to see it. He took a frog by its

hind feet, opened his wide mouth and dropped the frog’s fore-feet on his

tongue. The frog struggled to get free, and at the critical moment the

hind legs were let go, and down went the frog, head foremost, into his

gullet. He was our hero for the time; none other dared to attempt the

same feat. He said that he felt the frog all the way as it went down to

his stomach, and in it.

The school was hateful to me in many ways, and lovable in none, so I was

heartily glad to be taken away from it in 1832. I thence returned to my

family party, who were newly settled in Leamington. It then consisted

of my father, mother, and three sisters; my brothers were away, and my

other sister, Lucy, who had married, was living near Birmingham. My

grandfather Galton had recently died, and the consequent large accession

to my father’s income justified his change of residence, which gave him

and my sisters a wider social intercourse than they had at the Larches.

Leamington was at that time a little place, attractive to many eminent

invalids, who drank the waters and consulted Dr. Jephson, then becoming

celebrated.

I was next sent to a small private school at Kenilworth, consisting of

some half-dozen pupils, where I received much kindness, and breathed

the air of unconstraint during three happy years. It was kept by Mr.

Attwood, the clergyman of the parish (a near relative of the inventor of

“Attwood’s machine,” by which the rate of falling bodies is measured),

who, without any pretence of learning, showed so much sympathy with

boyish tastes and aspirations that I began to develop freely. Two of my

fellow-pupils, Matthew P. Watt and Hugh William Boulton, were brothers.

They were grandsons of my grandfather’s friend of the original “Boulton

and Watt” firm, and sons of my father’s friend, who carried on the

manufactory. Hugh William became an exceptionally handsome and socially

favoured Life-Guardsman; he died young. Matthew was then, subsequently at

Cambridge, and again for some years afterwards, an object of reverence

to me. I have known few or any who seemed to me his natural superiors in

breadth and penetration of intellect, but he was cursed with a fortune

far in excess of his simple though cultured needs, which exacted duties

from him that he hated. His large fortune also removed the stimulus which

necessity gives for getting through work and having done with it, instead

of lingering indefinitely. He consequently grew amateurish, wasting

thought on ingenious paradoxes and literary trifles, and failed to

check a natural tendency towards recluseness and some other oddities of

disposition. He gained the University prizes for Greek and Latin Epigrams

at Cambridge in 1841, but did not care to compete for other honours. His

artistic sense was of a high and classical order. His ideal, like that

of Goethe, was a uniform culture of all the higher faculties. There was

nothing ignoble in his nature. Whenever I talked with him about my own

occasional annoyances, they seemed to become petty through his broad

way of looking at things, I may almost say under the mere influence of

his presence. His photograph, which is near me as I write, testifies to

a personality that accords with the grandeur of his character. I owe

much to his influence, and still remain conscious of the void in my

friendships caused by his death very many years ago.

When I was fourteen years old it became time for me to go to a bigger

school. My father had a Quaker’s repugnance to public schools of the

usual type, and it was finally decided that I should be sent to King

Edward’s School in Birmingham, then commonly known as the “Free School,”

to which a headmaster of high attainments had been recently appointed.

This was Dr. Jeune (1806-1868), afterwards Master of Pembroke College,

Oxford, and Bishop of Peterborough. I lived as a pupil, together with

a few others, at his house by the Five Ways, to which a considerable

garden was attached, and whence we walked daily, through a mile or so

of street, to and from the school. I retained Dr. Jeune’s friendship

until his death, and it was impossible not to recognise his exceptional

ability and educational zeal, but the character of the education was

altogether uncongenial to my temperament. I learnt nothing, and chafed at

my limitations. I had craved for what was denied, namely, an abundance of

good English reading, well-taught mathematics, and solid science. Grammar

and the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhorrent to me, for there

seemed so little sense in them. I was a fool to have been recalcitrant,

and not to have profited by what I could have had, because many of my

schoolfellows prospered on the teaching. Three of them, F. Rendal, H.

Holden, and C. Evans, were the very first in classics of their respective

years at Cambridge. The two first were bracketed as equally deserving the

position of Senior Classic, and the third gained that honour unpaired.

Still, the literary provender provided at Dr. Jeune’s school disagreed

wholly with my mental digestion. The time spent there was a period of

stagnation to myself, which for many years I bitterly deplored, for I was

very willing and eager to learn, and could have learnt much if a suitable

teacher had been at hand to direct and encourage me.

CHAPTER III

MEDICAL STUDIES

First experience—Tour with Mr. Bowman—Birmingham

Hospital—Accidents—Sense of pain—King’s College—Professor R.

Partridge and others—Escape from drowning

It was strongly desired by both my parents, but especially by my mother,

that my future profession should be medicine, like that of her famous

father, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, F.R.S., and of her half-brother, Dr. Robert

Darwin, F.R.S. As I had aptitudes for that kind of study, my father fell

in with her views, and took great pains to give me the best educational

advantages. He acted largely on the advice of Mr. Hodgson, who brought me

as an infant into the world, and was a true and helpful friend to me all

through his life.

Mr. Hodgson (1788-1869) had settled in Birmingham a few years before my

birth, bringing with him a high medical reputation, especially for his

treatise on arteries and veins, and he soon obtained an eminent status

as a Warwickshire surgeon. He became President of the Medico-Chirurgical

Society in 1851, and, subsequently retiring from general practice, left

Birmingham and settled in London, where he held the office of President

of the College of Surgeons in 1864. He and his wife died on the same day

in 1869.

While I was still a young boy, my father contrived that I should see

something of a laboratory attached to the shop of the principal chemist

in Birmingham; again, during one of our summer visits to the seaside,

he discovered a needy foreign chemist who agreed to take me in hand,

at a rather high charge. All I clearly recollect of him now was, that

he seemed obsessed with the idea of making some wonderful compound out

of succinic acid, which is derived from amber, and that he spent all

his spare shillings in buying bits of amber and burning them. I learnt

nothing from his tuition; on the other hand, certain recollections of the

chemist’s laboratory still form part of my stock of mental imagery.

The step most momentous to myself was taken by my father in 1838, of

removing me at the age of sixteen, and in no ways against my will, from

Dr. Jeune’s school.

A little after, while I was at Leamington, my father asked our medical

attendant there, Mr. P., to show me an example of the medical work I

should be engaged in before I was plunged wholly into it. That first

experience is very memorable to me. It occurred on a night chilly out

of doors, while indoors our family party were assembled in cosy comfort

at dessert, after a good dinner, with a brightly burning fire, shining

mahogany table, wine, fruits, and all the rest, when a servant brought

a note from Mr. P. awaiting an answer. It was to the effect that a

housemaid had suddenly died at Lord ——’s house, and that he, Mr. P., was

about to make a post-mortem examination; would I like to come? Oh, the

mixture of revulsion, wonder, interest, and excitement! I changed clothes

and went, entering the house by a back door as directed, and treading

softly up the back staircase to the cold garret where the poor girl

lay. She was the first dead person I had seen, handsome in feature, but

greatly swollen. She had been apparently in perfect health a few hours

before, then she was suddenly seized with intense pain in the stomach,

followed rapidly by peritonitis and death. I can easily reproduce in

imagination all the ghastly horror of the scene and could describe it in

detail, but it would be unfitted for these pages. The perforated portion

of the stomach was such a small hole. Death “with a little pin, bores

through the castle wall, and—farewell, King!” (_King Richard II._). Mr.

P. pricked his finger while sewing up the abdomen. A dissection wound

when death has followed peritonitis is proverbially dangerous. It was so

in this case, for Mr. P. nearly died of it. I returned home chilled, awed

and sobered, and seemed for the time to have left boyhood behind me.

My father, ever thoughtful of securing for me the best education he

could, had arranged through Mr. Hodgson that one of his most promising

former pupils, who was going for a tour of a few weeks abroad, partly for

vacation, partly to see certain medical institutions, should take me with

him. He was William Bowman, in later years the great oculist, Sir William

(1816-1892), who combined a most refined and artistic temperament with

exceptional scientific ability. He obtained a European reputation for

medical research long before he was thirty years of age. Thenceforward

for many years he devoted himself almost entirely to professional work,

and though keeping abreast of the information of the day, contributed

little or nothing more of his own, in the way of research, to the great

regret of many. He was in later years a much valued member of many

scientific societies and an habitual frequenter of the Royal Institution,

near which he lived. The cause of his death, as I heard of it, was

pathetic. He had built and resided at a charming house in Surrey, near

Holmbury St. Mary, but retained his house in Clifford Street for some

years, where he occasionally made appointments with old patients. At last

the time came for wholly abandoning it. He lingered about the cold house,

visiting every part of it for the last time, for he had an affectionate

nature, caught a severe chill in doing so, and died of pneumonia.

To go back to the year 1838. I greatly enjoyed the tour and the

companionship of Bowman, from whom I doubtless imbibed and assimilated

more than I can now distinguish. The only event of a medical character

that I saw with him was a small operation, the first I ever witnessed. A

comic experience next occurred. I accompanied Bowman to a lunatic asylum

in Vienna. In those days I was particularly shy and sensitive, and a

consciousness of even the least unconventionality made me blush to an

absurd degree. In one of the female wards, a young, buxom, and uncommonly

good-looking female lunatic dashed forward with a joyful scream, she

clasped me tightly to her bosom with both her arms, calling me her

long-lost Fritz! _Tableau_—Amusement of the others, myself pink to the

ears.

I may as well here continue to talk about Bowman. He was a most accurate

and gifted draughtsman of pathological subjects. One of his earliest

discoveries related to the liver, and I was familiar with a drawing in

colours that he had made in illustration, which was preserved with great

respect at the Birmingham Hospital. In later years he told me that having

no further use for his collection of drawings, he gave them to Dr. B. In

time Dr. B. died, and Bowman then became desirous to get back his old

drawings as mementoes of early work, but could hear nothing of them. By

an extraordinary chance he was looking one day at prints in a second-hand

and second-rate book-shop, when his eye caught sight of a corner of these

very drawings. They were all there, and he bought them all back. He could

not learn their intermediate history.

It was in the autumn of 1838 that I took up my abode, as indoor pupil,

in the Birmingham General Hospital, then situated near Snow Hill. My

immediate chief was the house surgeon, Mr. Baker, who ultimately gained

considerable repute as a surgeon in Birmingham, but is now dead. My one

fellow indoor pupil had a similarly successful career to that of Mr.

Baker. There were also in the common dining-room two officials, the

matron and the treasurer. Matters were very different then; I, a mere boy

of sixteen, but with unquestionably an eager mind, was thrust without any

previous experience into a post that I found in a few months’ time to be

one of much responsibility. At first I was set to work every morning to

help in the dispensary. It was a room with a dresser and a service door

at the side. I there learnt the difference between infusions, decoctions,

tinctures, and extracts, and how to make them. Possibly the reader may

not know the meanings of these words, so I venture to give them. Tea is

an “infusion,” made by pouring boiling water on the tea and allowing it

to stand. Coffee is, or would be a “decoction” if made by boiling the

mixture. Infusions and decoctions are cheap forms of medicine, suitable

for hospitals where they are made daily, but they soon spoil when kept.

“Tinctures” are made by pouring spirits of wine instead of water on the

drugs; they keep indefinitely, but are more costly, and therefore rarely

used in hospitals. “Extracts” are made by boiling down decoctions.

All this is easily done when the proper simple apparatus and means

of heating are at hand. I once made an extract as an experiment that

I recommend to the notice of students who may wish to taste the _ne

plus ultra_ of bitterness. It was from quassia, that curious tree of

South America, of which the very chips are bitter. The once well-known

“bitter cup” is made of quassia wood. When water is poured into the

cup, it quickly becomes bitter. Quassia is a valuable tonic medicine,

with perhaps the one fault of _cheapness_. An apothecary can hardly be

expected to feel easy in conscience when he charges apothecary’s prices

for what every little chip of a timber tree affords when put into hot

water. Anyhow, I made a large jugful of decoction of quassia and boiled

it down until a sticky residue was left, which is, or might be, called

“quassine.” I put a piece of it about the size of a pin’s head upon my

tongue, and then—oh then! Try it, if you doubt its absolute bitterness.

It was amusing at first to make pills. The pill mass had to be brayed

together in a mortar, occasionally adding water or I forget what other

liquid, to render it of the proper consistency. Next a certain weight

of the pill mass was rolled out by the help of a simple but ingeniously

arranged slab, into a long worm of equal diameter and of standard length.

Then the worm was cut simultaneously into equal segments, by the pressure

of the grooved back of the same slab, by means of which the segments were

also rolled into pills.

The other day I visited the great store and manufactory of chemical

and other apparatus of Messrs. Griffiths, in or near Aldwych Street,

and saw there a machine, occupying little more room than a moderately

sized washing-stand, that claimed to turn out pills at the rate of

_one million_ in each twenty-four hours,—so if forty-five of these

machines were kept continually at work day and night, it would enable a

grandmotherly Socialist Government to supply to every man, woman, and

child of the forty-five millions of inhabitants of the British Isles one

free pill daily.

The out-patients clustered in the hall outside the service window of the

dispensary, and were supplied in turn. Then the prescriptions of the

in-patients were handed in and attended to. It was a busy time. I learnt

to do most of my part pretty well in a very few weeks, after which I was

promoted to higher things.

Having always the run of the dispensary, and being a boy, I found certain

drugs, such as liquorice, much to my taste, but especially poppy seed.

A large number of poppy capsules were kept in stock for making soothing

lotions. They are full of seeds, which contain no opium at all. These are

not used for the lotions, but are particularly pleasant to munch, and I

ate them in abundance when the humour seized me. In later years I found

poppy seeds in common use somewhere in Germany, for making a particular

pudding; I think it was in Bonn.

The duties gradually imposed on me were to go with the surgeons on their

morning rounds, always to attend in the accident room, where persons

suffering from accidents were received whether in the night or day,

and to help in dressing them, also to be present at all operations,

and to take part at every post-mortem examination, of which there were

perhaps two or three weekly. The times of which I am speaking were long

before those of chloroform, and many long years before that of Pasteur

and Sir Joseph Lister. The stethoscope was considered generally to

be new-fangled; the older and naturally somewhat deaf practitioners

pooh-poohed and never used it.

I cannot understand to this day why youths selected for their powers

of sharp hearing should not be so far instructed as to be used by

physicians, much as pointers and setters are used by sportsmen.

They could be taught what to listen for, probably by means of some

sound-emitting instruments more or less muffled, and how to describe what

they heard. A patient during the incipient stage of his disease might be

submitted to examination by one or more of these quick-hearing youths,

who would report to the doctor, who thereupon would form and express

his opinion. Similarly as regards touch, of which great delicacy is of

the highest importance. Conceive what help might be given by them in

discovering deeply seated tumours, abscesses, and much else. The touch

of a person far less sensitive than that of the wandering Princess of

the well-known fairy tale might prove of vital importance. It will be

recollected that her Princess-ship was acknowledged by all, through her

discovering a pea surreptitiously inserted as a test, below the bottom of

the pile of feather-beds on which she slept.

To return to my duties. Accidents occurred, of course, at all hours of

the day and night. It was unpleasant to be summoned out of a warm bed to

attend upon these once on a cold night, but it was not a hardship; to be

summoned twice was trying; but thrice, as sometimes happened, was more

than I could have endured had it frequently occurred. Burns were the

commonest of the accidents at night-time. The sufferers were piteous to

see. As a rule they did not complain much of pain, but they shivered from

a sense of cold and were enfeebled almost to prostration by the shock.

There was nothing to be done to them beyond cutting away all adherent

clothing and the like, packing them in cotton wool and sending them to

a ward. One particular ward was allotted to that purpose. The contrast

was great between the neatly dressed patient of the first night and the

wretched creature two days after, when suppuration had begun and the foul

dressings had to be carefully picked off and replaced by clean ones.

Broken heads from brawls were common accidents at night; then it was

my part to shave the head, using the blood as lather, which makes a

far better preparation for shaving than soap. The wounds were stitched

together with a three-cornered “glove needle,” which cuts its way through

the skin. Some riots connected with the “Charter” occurred at this

time, and many people were hurt. It was curious to observe the apparent

cleanness of the cuts that were made through the scalp by the blow of a

policeman’s round truncheon.

It sometimes happened that a severe case was brought at night-time,

which required higher surgical skill than could properly be expected in

the house surgeon, who, though professionally qualified, was young, and

therefore relatively unpractised. If the treatment of any such accident

admitted of no delay, a messenger was dispatched to the house of the

surgeon himself, to wake and bring him. One of these events made a great

impression on me. It was that of a man, a small piece of whose skull

had been depressed by something falling on his head and stunning him.

He was brought in utterly unconscious, with the “stertorous” or snoring

respiration characteristic of such cases. The man had to be trepanned,

so the surgeon was sent for. In the meantime everything was prepared for

his arrival. The trepan is a hollow steel cylinder with teeth cut out of

its lower rim, used to saw a circular wad out of the sound bone nearest

to the fracture. A miniature steel crowbar is used to raise the depressed

fragment, and a rod to lay across the sound bone as a fulcrum for the

crowbar. I seem to see it all before me as I write. The brightly lighted

room, the apparatus in order, the surgeon at work, the eager faces of the

bystanders, and the utterly unconscious patient. The wad was cut out, the

crowbar adjusted, and still the monotonous snore continued unchanged.

Then pressure was put on the free end of the crowbar, the broken bit of

skull was raised, and instantly life rushed back. The man continued a

sentence that he must have begun before the accident; then he stared

wildly, and said, “Where am I?” The clock of life had stopped through a

temporary obstruction, the obstruction was removed and the clock ticked

on as before. He was soothed, a silver plate was inserted over the hole,

the scalp was replaced and stitched together, and he was sent into the

ward. In due time he wholly recovered, the scalp having grown over the

plate.

I had the option of accompanying any of the surgeons or physicians on

his morning round. Each had his clinical clerk, who made notes of the

case and wrote the treatment prescribed from time to time, upon a paper

affixed to a board at the bed-head. I appreciated from the very first the

high importance of careful study and record of every case. My feeling

is now fully developed which was then in embryo, that it is our duty

to avail ourselves of the opportunities that arise from the apparently

unmoral course of Nature, of rendering similar events less dangerous and

painful in the future. Blind Nature seems to vivisect ruthlessly, let us

as reasonable creatures elicit all the good we can from her vivisections,

for which we ourselves are in no way responsible. I became a clinical

clerk in time, but felt acutely my incompetence to act up to my own high

ideals.

It was a surprise to me to notice so few signs of pain and distress in

the wards, even among the mortally stricken. I met with no instances of

terror at approaching death, while the ordinary interests of life seemed

powerful up to the close of consciousness. But it must be terrible to a

sensitive and stricken fellow-patient with all his senses still on the

alert, when the death-hour of some one else in the ward arrives, and the

curtains are drawn around the dying man’s bed to hide the scene, and

again when his remains are removed to the post-mortem room. All these

things are, however, more hideous to the imagination than in reality.

One piteous death-bed scene much impressed me. A girl was fast dying

of typhus, and I had been instructed to apply a mustard plaister. When

I came to her, she was fully sensible, and said in a faint but nicely

mannered way, “Please leave me in peace. I know I am dying, and am not

suffering.” I had not the heart to distress her further.

The opinions held by the students about the several physicians and

surgeons were curiously guided by a mixture of loyalty and irreverence.

There was no doubt of the fact that M., one of the doctors, who never

professed or had a claim to scientific acquirements, got his patients

out of hospital more quickly than any of his colleagues. His treatment

was as simple as that of Dr. Sangrado, though of quite another kind. It

consisted of a strong purgative followed by low diet, and a subsequent

feeding up as soon as all fever had gone. The composition of his

drench never varied; a big bottle of it was made every morning in the

dispensary, in readiness to be served out. It was so cheap that the

overplus could be thrown away and a fresh infusion made the next day.

It is to be wished that some “index of curative skill” could be awarded

to doctors, based on their respective hospital successes. I have often

amused myself with imaginary schemes to this effect. If it could be

compiled truthfully, it would be an excellent guide to those who wanted a

doctor but were doubtful whom to consult. A high index of curative skill

would serve as a measure of merit, and the fee to the doctor might be

regulated by its height.

I threw myself into my duties with zeal, and loved neat bandaging and

neat plaistering. Each clinical clerk had a dressing board, supported

against his body by a strong band passed over his neck: its ends were

fixed to the board. Lint, plaister, scissors, forceps, probe, and a

few other simple surgical instruments completed the outfit. There was

much bleeding from the arm, especially of out-patients; there were also

cuppings and insertion of issues and of setons. All these I could soon

do creditably; I was fairly good even at tooth-drawing. I set broken

limbs, at first under strict supervision, but was latterly allowed much

freedom. I had also occasionally to reduce dislocations of the arm, and

once at least of the thigh. The mechanism of the body began to appear

very simple in its elementary features. At one time no less than sixteen

fractures, dislocations, or other injuries to the arms, or parts of them,

were practically under my sole care all at the same time. Of course my

proceedings were carefully watched.

The following incident in those pre-chloroform days set me thinking.

A powerful drayman was brought in dead drunk, with both of his thighs

crushed and mangled by a heavy waggon. They had to be amputated at once.

He remained totally unconscious all the time, and it was not until he

awoke sober in the morning that he discovered that his legs were gone.

He recovered completely. The question that then presented itself to me

was, “Why could not people be made dead drunk before operations? Could

it not be effected without upsetting their digestion and doing harm in

other ways?” The subsequent discovery of _inhaling_, instead of drinking

the intoxicating spirit, whether it be chloroform or ether, solved that

question most happily.

The cries of the poor fellows who were operated on were characteristic;

in fact, each class of operation seemed to evoke some peculiar form of

them. All this was terrible, but only at first. It seemed after a while

as though the cries were somehow disconnected with the operation, upon

which the whole attention became fixed.

It was obvious that different persons felt pain with very different

degrees of acuteness. I may here go quite out of chronological sequence,

and refer to an experience in 1851, when I was on the point of starting

from a mission station on my exploration of Damara Land, then wholly

unknown but now a German possession. It will be again alluded to in

a later chapter. A branch missionary outpost, twenty miles off, had

lately been raided, and most of the people, other than the missionaries

themselves, murdered. Of those who escaped, two women, each with both

of their feet hacked off, made their way to the station, at which I saw

them. The Damara women wear heavy copper rings on their ankles, put on

when they are growing girls that the rings may not slip over their feet

when they are adult. These coveted treasures can therefore be obtained

only by the summary process of cutting off the feet. In this horribly

mutilated state the two women crawled the whole of the twenty miles. The

stumps had healed when I saw them. I asked how they staunched the blood.

They explained by gesture that it was by stumping the bleeding ends into

the sand, and they grinned with satisfaction while they explained.

I may yet travel onwards many more years to another illustrative

anecdote. I happened to be President of the Anthropological Institute,

when a very interesting memoir was read on the subject now in question.

Numerous instances were given of a very startling character, but the one

that seemed the most so was a story told there by the late Sir James

Paget, as communicated to him by a trustworthy friend; he added that he

felt compelled to believe it. It referred to a native New Zealander.

It appeared that at the time in question it was the height of fashion

for the Maoris to wear boots on great occasions, and not to appear

barefooted. A youth had saved money and went to a store a long way off,

where he purchased a pair of these precious articles. On returning home

he tried to put them on, but one of his feet had a long projecting toe

which prevented it from being thrust home. He went quite as a matter of

course to fetch a bill-hook which was at hand, and, putting his foot on a

log of wood, chopped off the end of his long toe and drew on the boot.

There was another occurrence in those pre-Pasteur days on which my mind

dwelt often. It was a story corroborated by many analogous but much less

striking instances that came under my own observation, of a man who

had stumbled into a cauldron of scalding pitch. He was quickly pulled

out, but the pitch had so enclosed and adhered to one of his legs that

nothing could be done with safety to remove it. The other leg was cleaned

as well as might be and carefully dressed, and in that state, with one

leg cased in pitch, the other bandaged, he was sent to bed. After many

days, the leg that was enclosed in pitch ceased to hurt, and the covering

became so loose that it was desirable and easy to remove it, when lo and

behold! instead of a vast suppurating surface, the leg was found to be

entirely healed. The other leg, which had been less hurt and carefully

dressed, remained much longer unhealed. It seemed clear that the art of

dressing was far behind what was possible, and that an application of

the dressing before “the air got into the wound” was the thing to be

aimed at. The subsequent discovery by Pasteur of the germ theory, and the

practical application of it by Sir Joseph, now Lord Lister, has overcome

the difficulty.

I was so keen at my medical work, that, being desirous of appreciating

the effects of different medicines, I began by taking small doses of all

that were included in the pharmacopœia, commencing with the letter A. It

was an interesting experience, but had obvious drawbacks. However, I got

nearly to the end of the letter C, when I was stopped by the effects of

Croton oil. I had foolishly believed that two drops of it could have no

notable effects as a purgative and emetic; but indeed they had, and I can

recall them now.

There were histories of occasional outbursts of hysteria in the female

wards; one took place whilst I was there. It was a most curious and

afflicting spectacle of pure panic. One woman had begun to scream and

rave, then another followed suit, then another, and pandemonium seemed

at hand. It was stopped by rather rough measures, gentle ones making

matters worse. There was a current story of one of the surgeons having

effectually stopped a most threatening outbreak, which the nurses began

to join, in which an abundance of cold water was only part of the remedy

employed.

Many protean forms of that strange disorder, hysteria, were frequently

pointed out to me. The demoralisation that accompanied it was shown by

the gross and palpable lies told by the patients in their desire at

any cost to attract attention. A paroxysm of it may resemble a severe

epileptic fit. I was informed in all seriousness by a friend, of a

valuable way of distinguishing them, important for nurses to bear in

mind, that in epilepsy the patient might and often did bite himself, his

tongue for example, but in hysteria the patients never bit themselves but

always other people.

Delirium tremens was a strange malady. The struggles were sometimes

terrible, yet the pulse was feeble and the reserve of strength almost

nil. The visions of the patients seemed indistinguishable by them from

realities; in the few cases I saw, they were wholly of fish or of

creeping things. One of the men implored me to take away the creature

that was crawling over his counterpane, following its imagined movements

with his finger and staring as at a ghost. Poor humanity! I often feel

that the tableland of sanity upon which most of us dwell, is small in

area, with unfenced precipices on every side, over any one of which we

may fall.

The hysterical scream which so strongly affects other women is a forcible

instance of the power of sound, whose limits are, as yet, imperfectly

explored. The tones of a great actor or orator may thrill the whole

being. An unemotional elderly gentleman told me years ago, that he

was haunted by the recollection of the resonance of Pitt’s voice when

speaking of some event (I forget what it was) that gave him a “pang.”

There are many kinds of shrieks of a blood-curdling nature, of which that

of a wounded horse on a battlefield is said to be one.

* * * * *

_Kings College._—After a brief vacation I was sent, again through Mr.

Hodgson’s ever active interest, for a year to King’s College and to live

as an inmate of the house of Professor Richard Partridge (1805-1873),

together with four or five other pupils. His house was in New Street,

Spring Gardens, now demolished through the extension of the Admiralty

Buildings and the newly constructed entrance from Charing Cross into

St. James’s Park. My social surroundings were of a far higher order

than those at Birmingham, and I rejoiced in them. Professor Partridge

was, at that time, a brilliant man of about thirty-four years of age,

yellow-haired, full of humour and of quips, as well as of shrewdness and

kindliness; his intimate friends were all growing into distinction. He

had known Charles Lamb well, and the genius of Elia seemed to haunt the

house, though Charles Lamb had died four or five years before. I listened

with admiration to the brilliant talk and repartees when Partridge had

his bachelor dinners with fellow-cronies as guests. They included G.

Dasent, later Sir George, the author and Civil Service Commissioner;

Professor Wheatstone, later Sir Charles, who conjointly with Cooke was

the introducer of the electric telegraph; A. Smee the electrician,

subsequently an authority on gardening, and others.

Professor Richard Partridge, F.R.S., familiarly called “Dickey,” was

brother to John Partridge, R.A., and Professor of Anatomy. It was

commonly said that the brothers had each followed the occupation best

fitted to the other. Certainly Richard Partridge was an admirable

draughtsman, but was not, so far as I was then capable of judging, a man

who really loved and revelled in science. He delighted in minute points

of human anatomy and did not generalise, consequently the information

given in his lectures seemed to me as dry as the geography of Pinnock’s

Catechism. For all that, they were enlivened by his never-failing humour.

His instruction seemed to me deficient in the why and the wherefore. A

human hand was just a human hand to him; its analogies with paws, hoofs,

wings, claws, and fins were never alluded to.

I spent a happy time under his roof. We pupils had the drawing-room to

read and write in, with a wardrobe and a hanging closet tenanted by a

jointed skeleton which we could study at will. The days were spent in the

Medical Department of King’s College, which was quite disconnected with

the classical side. All the pupils entered at the same door, but there

we separated. The medicals turned sharply to the right, and many of them

went downstairs to the dissection room, where much of my own time was

spent.

The immediate chiefs of the dissection room were nominally my old

travelling companion and tutor, William Bowman and John Simon, but Bowman

had other College work to perform, and was rarely present. Mr. Simon,

afterwards Sir John Simon (_b._ 1816), of the Board of Health, was

practically the only Director. His quaint phrases, full of scientific

insight and poetical in essence, were most attractive. His collected

essays and reports are models of literary style applied to scientific

subjects. He died three or four years ago, quite blind, at a very

advanced age.

All the Professors whose lectures I had to attend, were notable men. Dr.

Todd (1809-1860), the Professor of Physiology, gave a powerful impulse to

his branch of science. He was then engaged in collaboration with Bowman

in bringing out their Encyclopedia of Physiology, which was a remarkable

work for those days. The signs of advance were all about and in the air.

The microscope had rather suddenly attained a position of much enhanced

importance; it was now mounted solidly, with really good working stages

and with good glasses. Powell was the principal maker of it, and a

Powell’s microscope was an object almost of worship to advanced students.

The manufacture of microscopes has rapidly and steadily advanced since

those times, both in cheapness and in goodness: what was then a rarity is

now in the possession of every student.

I enjoyed the lectures of Daniell (1790-1845) on Chemistry; he was so

simple and thorough. In those times the galvanic cell was becoming

perfected, and the three forms then invented, the Smee, the Daniell,

and the Grove (the latter being by my valued friend in later years,

Justice Sir William Grove), still retain their names. Electrotyping

was invented by Smee, and I recall well the humorously pathetic manner

in which Daniell explained to his class how the neglect of drawing an

obvious inference had prevented him from figuring as its discoverer. He

had noticed the marvellous fidelity with which the marks of a file had

appeared on a copper sheath electrically thrown down upon it, as the

result of some chance experiment, but he had failed to infer that medals

and the like might be copied by the same process.

It is needless to go into particulars of my course at King’s College.

They had much the same result on me in opening the mind that a similar

experience must have on every keen medical student, but I do not remember

any special characteristic worthy of record. I did pretty well at my

studies. My chief competitor was George Johnson, afterwards Sir George

(1818-1896), whose thoroughness of work and character I admired. He beat

me in physiology, in which I came out second. I think the only prize I

ever got all to myself was in the minor subject of Forensic Medicine,

in which I delighted. It had a sort of Sherlock Holmes fascination for

me, while the instances given as cautions, showing where the value of

too confident medical assertions had been rudely upset by the shrewd

cross-questioning of lawyers, confirmed what I was beginning vaguely to

perceive, that doctors had the fault, equally with parsons, of being much

too positive.

My friend Sir G. Johnson subsequently became the leader of one of the

two opposed methods of dealing with cholera. His was the “eliminative”

view, namely, that there was mischief in the system that Nature strove

to eliminate, so he prescribed castor oil to expedite matters; others

took the exactly opposite view, consequently there was open war between

the two methods. I read somewhere that one of Johnson’s most fiery

opponents considered the number of deaths occasioned by his method to

amount to eleven thousand. Leaving aside all question of the accuracy

of the estimate of this particular treatment, it is easy to see that

when a pestilence lies heavily on a nation, the numbers affected are so

large that a proper or improper treatment may be capable of saving or of

destroying many thousands of lives. By all means, then, let competitive

methods be tested at hospitals on a sufficiently large scale to settle

their relative merits. Of this I will speak further almost immediately.

One part of my duties was to attend King’s College Hospital, but the

position of a student there was far less instructive than that of an

indoor pupil at the Birmingham Hospital, where responsibility was great

and there was no crowding. The teaching was, however, greatly superior

to the generality of that at Birmingham. The position of house pupil and

resident medical officer has long since become highly and justly prized,

and is now obtainable only after competition and by the best men.

Medical knowledge has advanced so far that more scientific treatment

can be had in many small country towns than was formerly procurable

even in London. Still, the experience haunts my memory of Dr. M. at the

Birmingham Hospital, of his habitual drench of which I wrote, and of his

remarkable success in turning out his patients nominally cured. There

is still much lack of exact knowledge of what Nature can do without

assistance from medicine, if aided only by cheering influences, rest,

suggestion, and good nursing.

I wish that hospitals could be turned into places for experiment more

than they are, in the following perfectly humane direction. Suppose

two different and competing treatments of a particular malady; I have

just mentioned a case in point. Let the patients suffering under it be

given the option of being placed under Dr. A. or Dr. B., the respective

representatives of the two methods, and the results be statistically

compared. A co-operation without partisanship between many large

hospitals ought to speedily settle doubts that now hang unnecessarily

long under dispute.

Medical statistics are, however, the least suitable of any I know for

refined comparisons, because the conditions that cannot be, or at all

events are not taken into account, are local, very influential, and apt

to differ greatly. It is, however, humiliating to find how much has

failed to attract attention for want of even the rudest statistics. I

doubt whether the unaided apprehension of man suffices to distinguish

between the frequency of what occurs on an average four times in ten

events and one that occurs five times. Much grosser proportions have been

wholly overlooked by doctors. I referred once to many dictionaries and

works of medicine published before the time of Broca, some ninety years

ago, and did not find a single reference to the almost invariable loss of

speech associated with paralysis of the right side. Still more recently,

the idea of consumption being communicated by any form of infection was

stoutly denied by English medical men. As to rules of diet, the changes

are ludicrous. Robert Frere, one of my fellow-pupils when with Professor

Partridge, became through marriage in later years a managing partner in

a very old and eminent firm of wine merchants. They had supplied George

IV. with his brandy and the like. He told me that the books of the firm

showed that every class of wine had in its turn been favoured by the

doctors.

There were many incidents that I could tell about this time of my life

that might be interesting in some sense, but which are foreign to the

main purpose of such an autobiography as mine, which is to indicate how

the growth of a mind has been affected by circumstances. I will, however,

make one exception, which refers to a very narrow escape from drowning.

I had been in a steamboat, crammed with people, to see the Oxford and

Cambridge boat-race, and was returning with stream and tide. The arches

of Old Battersea Bridge were narrow, and it required careful steering

on such occasions to get safely through them. The steamboat on which I

was yawed greatly. I was standing behind the right-hand paddle-box, when

it crashed against one of the piers and split open just in front of me,

giving a momentary view of the still revolving paddles. The shock sent

me down among them. I was conscious of two taps on the back of my head,

and then the water swirled over me. In a few seconds my wits had gathered

themselves together, and I found myself submerged under a mass of wood,

which afterwards proved to be the outer sheathing of the paddle-box. I

dived to get clear of it, but found myself held back by projecting nails

which had hooked into my clothes. My breath was becoming exhausted, so

I passed my hand quickly but steadily all over myself, disentangling

nails in two or three places, and then made my last dive for life. I

fortunately rose clear, and utilised my former enemy the mass of wood as

a raft. I was sufficiently unhurt to help another man who was also in the

water and in distress, by pushing a piece of wood to him.

There was, of course, much commotion all about the scene. The steamboat

drifted helplessly; boats put off from the shore; the men in the first

boat that reached me tried to drive a hard bargain, asking a sovereign to

take me in, but being in safety I was able to resist extortion. I then

rowed to the ship, and my face was, I understood, a spectacle, being

painted with blood that had flowed freely from a few scratches and was

spread all over it by the wetting. There was much sympathy shown on the

steamboat, and an especial interest in me on the part of the captain,

who from the character of his questions obviously feared having to pay

damages. So I at last landed, and, feeling little the worse after a

short rest, cabbed home to Mr. Partridge’s house. The only object that

really suffered was my rather valuable watch. There is a short account

of this accident in the Life of Leonard Horner, F.R.S., by his daughter

K. M. Lyell, ii. 19. I did not hear that any notice of it got into the

newspapers.

I will finish now what little I have to add about my medical experiences,

skipping over four or five years in a few lines. While at Cambridge, of

which I shall speak in a separate chapter, I attended a few lectures,

chiefly by Dr. Haviland, in order to obtain some more of the necessary

certificates to qualify me for undergoing an examination and obtaining a

doctor’s degree. After I left Cambridge, some more lectures had still to

be attended, so I was sent for a short time as a pupil at St. George’s

Hospital. My dear father’s death then occurred, as will be mentioned

farther on, and the direction of my life became changed.

CHAPTER IV

SHORT TOUR TO THE EAST

Giessen—Linz—Rowboat to Vienna—Steam down Danube and overland

to Black Sea—Constantinople—Smyrna—Quarantines at Syra and

Trieste—Adelsberg—Diligence from Milan to Boulogne—Home

In the spring of 1840 a passion for travel seized me as if I had been a

migratory bird. While attending the lectures at King’s College I could

see the sails of the lighters moving in sunshine on the Thames, and it

required all my efforts to disregard the associations of travel which

they aroused. On fine mornings I could not keep still in the house in

Spring Gardens where I lived, but wandered in St. James’s Park. On these

occasions I noticed that the weathercock on the Horse Guards seemed to

point nearly always to the south-west. The explanation proved to be that

the fit seized me with violence when a south-west wind was blowing.

It was arranged by my father that I should accompany Dr. Allen Miller

(1817-1870), subsequently a great chemist and for many years Treasurer of

the Royal Society, to Giessen, where the more promising young chemists of

those days gathered to avail themselves of the teaching of Liebig, then

the foremost of the chemical Professors in Germany. My father gave me

a liberal letter of credit, for, having been a banker himself, he was

unwilling that my balance should ever run low; besides, he was always

cautious in making ample provision for unexpected contingencies. So to

Giessen I went, but soon finding that my chemical knowledge, and indeed

my knowledge of German, was by no means sufficiently advanced for me to

profit from Liebig’s teaching, I determined to throw that plan over, to

make a dash and go as far as my money allowed, consistent with returning

to England early in October in time for my first term at Cambridge. I

had saturated myself since the age of nine with Byron’s poetry, which

gave me a longing to see the East; besides, a new route Eastwards had

been opened, between Czernavoda and Kustendji, the former lying on that

long reach of the Lower Danube where it most nearly approaches the Black

Sea, and Kustendji situated on the Black Sea itself. A calculation of the

cost showed that my finances would suffice for this and more, so away

I went. A steamer ran twice or thrice a week from Linz to Vienna, and

once (I think) in a fortnight from Vienna down the Danube, and the times

fitted nicely. But on arrival at Linz it proved that the steamer bound

for Vienna was disabled and would not run for some days. This serious

contretemps threatened to ruin my whole scheme, which required that I

should reach Vienna in time for a particular steamer.

I had made friends with an elderly British officer at the hotel, who was

in much the same plight as myself, for it was as important to him as to

me, though for other reasons, to reach Vienna without delay. He told me

that he had found a boatman who would take us all the way, some seventy

miles down stream, for a moderate sum, and that he was willing to go

if I would join him. I accepted his proposal, he having assured me that

the boat would be adequately manned, and that the journey would be both

easy and interesting. His power of German conversation was even less than

mine, and either he had not understood aright or he had been cheated,

for when we had entered the boat in the dark by help of the faint and

flickering light of a lantern, and had been pushed off into the current

of the swiftly flowing Danube, I perceived that the boatmen consisted

only of one old man and a boy. It was impossible to return, so we made

the best of it. One of us two, and it was more frequently myself, for

my companion wanted both youth and muscle, had to work an oar almost

continuously in order to give steerage-way to the boat.

We toiled through the night and the following morning, hardly resting

at all till we reached Mölk, where provisions and fruit were bought

and another boatman engaged, and we went onwards after brief delay. We

arrived as near to Vienna as the police regulations allowed, very late at

night; but by unexpected good fortune the officials allowed us to land

and to sleep hard by, so I was in good time for the steamer, and after a

short stay was off in her. I had some agreeable fellow-passengers, and it

was a momentous voyage to me.

The first stoppage was at Pesth, where I was quite unprepared for the

grandeur of its quays and buildings. Thenceforward we entered comparative

barbarism. There was a considerable delay at the famous rapids of the

“Iron Gates,” long since removed by blasting the rocks that gave them

their name, and where the river ran strongly. I witnessed boats of no

large size being towed up stream by the longest teams of men and horses

that I have ever seen. If my memory does not play tricks, I counted no

less than ninety-six horses hauling a single boat. I drove as far as

time allowed among the Carpathians towards Mehadia, a then secluded

watering-place, in the company of two Hungarians, with one of whom—a

Kaunitz—I had struck up a travelling friendship, and who told me much

about Hungary.

The position of Belgrade was imposing. It was then in Turkish occupation,

and the Turks still wore turbans. The town being in quarantine, we were

not allowed to land. The flat shores of Wallachia were most uninteresting

and looked fever-haunted. The only human life visible for miles together

was that of an occasional coast-guardsman perched in a crow’s nest on the

top of a pole, to prevent smugglers from crossing the Danube unseen. At

one place we cut through a shoal of water snakes crossing the river, with

their heads out of water and their bodies wriggling horizontally. It was

a sight upon which a horrible nightmare might have been founded.

At length we arrived at our journey’s end, where light waggons awaited

us, which were drawn across the open country. I walked the greater part

of the distance, and so reached the Black Sea at Kustendji. The steamer

started in threatening weather, and particularly rough seas ensued. We

rolled so badly and so briskly that a square chest containing seamen’s

things, which stood on the deck, was toppled over. In the morning, the

historical Symplegades were in sight, and certainly the superstitious

Greeks might well have accredited them, as they did, with the power

of shutting like jaws and crushing vessels that attempted to pass

between them, for the apparent width of the intervening space changes

rapidly with changing perspective. Then we steamed through the glorious

Bosphorus, whose sides were far less built upon than now, past Therapia

to Constantinople, or Stamboul, as it was commonly called.

I revelled in the glory of the place and in the picturesque and turbaned

groups. The hotel kept by Miseri was then a small establishment, more

like a pension. He had been courier to a connection of mine, and I was

taken in and made very comfortable. The numerous acquaintances I picked

up there and the stories I heard of the current rascalities gave an

insight into a phase of humanity which I did not esteem but was glad to

know about.

Though I am now inclined to twaddle about what was then so new, so

strange and exhilarating to me, it would not interest readers who are

probably familiar with far more graphic accounts of this capital of the

East than I have skill to write. The sherbet, iced with snow from the

neighbouring Mount Olympus, shares, I suppose, with similar sherbet at

Granada, iced with snow from the Sierra Nevada, the honour of parentage

to our very modern ice-creams. In my youth the only good ice-cream maker

in London was Gunter in Berkeley Square, and the very existence of such

a luxury as ice-cream had then, as I know, been recently scoffed at by

the educated daughters of a clergyman in South Wales. After about six

days’ stay in Constantinople, I had to move onwards, taking a steamer to

Smyrna. Olympus stood grandly above the shores of the Sea of Marmora;

then came the Hellespont, then the Troad, then Smyrna.

My allowance of time was drawing to a close, for I had to make ample

allowance for long detention in quarantines, which were in those times

an especial nuisance. They were put on or taken off with apparent

caprice, sometimes it was said for purely commercial reasons. So I was

able to allow only two or three days for seeing the environs of Smyrna,

and then started in a steamer to the island of Syra, where I was placed

for ten days in quarantine. My rooms were like those of a khan, wholly

unfurnished, the guardian supplying bedding and food at moderate cost. He

followed me as a prisoner under his charge, with a long stick wherewith

to ward me from touching or being touched by any body or thing that was

not in the same quarantine as myself. The quarantine buildings enclosed a

large square. My rooms opened at the back into a cheerful covered balcony

which looked on the sea. My neighbouring occupant was a lady, a near

relative to Arthur Cayley, the great mathematician, whom I even then had

learnt to revere, and whose pupil I became during one of my happy long

vacations at Cambridge.

The laws of quarantine were curiously minute. Metal, such as a coin, was

not supposed to be so deeply infected but that a simple washing would

purify it; paper must be pricked and fumigated; but clothing had to

undergo as much quarantine as the wearer, and even more, as will be seen

later on. It was ruled that if any part of a cloth or fabric of fibres

was touched by a person in quarantine, the whole of it became equally

tainted. So I put to my guardian the case of touching one end of a very

long rope, but could get no reasonable answer, any more than a child

can when he puts searching questions. Violation of quarantine is a very

serious offence. A soldier would shoot a person without mercy, and with

the approbation of his superiors, if that appeared to be the only way of

preventing it.

The nine or ten days’ rest in quarantine at Syra was by no means

ungrateful. I made myself occupation, and they passed pleasantly. The

process of giving “_pratique_” was amusing. We were drawn up in a row,

and the medical officer walked up and down sternly scrutinising us.

Then he gave the order of “Put out your tongues,” which we all did

simultaneously, and he passed along the line at two paces distance

from it, looking at our tongues. Then he added, “Do exactly as I do,”

whereupon he clapped himself sharply under the left armpit with his

right hand, and under the right armpit with the left hand. Similarly on

the left and right groins. This was to prove that none of the glandular

swellings that give the name of “bubonic” plague were there, otherwise

the pain of the performance would have been intolerable. Then, with

a sudden change from a stern aspect, he put on a most friendly and

courteous smile, and stepping forwards he shook each of us cordially by

the hand, and we were freed. A couple of days had to pass before the

next steamer started for Trieste, which I occupied in rambling about

the island, living for one day almost wholly on figs—which was unwise,

because too much of them affects the kidneys.

I started with the steamer, had a few, but memorable, hours at

Athens, lay for two days in quarantine off Ancona, and was landed in

the quarantine at Trieste. What Turkey was to Greece in respect of

quarantine, that Greece was to Turkey.

There was a curious custom at Trieste of “making _Spoglio_,” as they

phrased it. When three or four days of the normal length of quarantine

had still to run, it was permissible to strip and leave all clothes

behind, to bathe, to put on new clothes, and to be free. The process is

based on the assumption that the well-washed human body, if in apparent

health after say a week’s seclusion, may justly be considered free from

infection, whereas the clothes worn by it must remain still longer in

quarantine. What happened was this. We were inspected by the doctor,

and then directed to the edge of a covered quay, opposite to which was

another quay where old-clothes men displayed their wares; a strip of sea

water, perhaps 4 or 5 feet deep and 20 wide, separated the two quays. A

bargain had to be made with one of the old-clothes men by shouting across

the water. I was to leave everything I had on me, excepting coin or other

metal, and papers which were about to be fumigated, in exchange for the

offered clothes. When the bargain was concluded, I stripped, plunged in,

and emerged on the opposite quay stark naked, to be newly clothed and to

receive freedom. The clothes-man got my old things in due time—that was

his affair. The new clothes were thin, and the trousers were made of a

sort of calico and deficient in the fashionable cut of my old ones; but

as it was not then late in the year the thinness mattered little in those

latitudes, and I did not care about the rest.

I occupied two of the days I had saved by making Spoglio, in visiting

the wonderful caves of Adelsberg. A view over the Adriatic when driving

up the mountain-side on the way to that place, remains still in my mind

as one of the three or four most glorious views that I have had the

privilege to see. The long walk underground at Adelsberg, the black and

vicious stream that ran through it, looking like a river of death, and

the fantastic stalactites and stalagmites were indeed astonishing. I

bought two of the curious creatures called Proteus, that live in these

underground waters. They have no real eyes, but sightless dots in the

place of them; their colour is that of the buried portion of stems of

celery (etiolated, as it is commonly called), and they have both gills

and lungs. They were the first living creatures of their kind brought to

England. I gave them to King’s College; one soon died, the other lived

and was yearly lectured on, as I heard, until fate in the form of a cat

ended him.

I went from Trieste by steamer to Venice, and thence by diligence to

Milan, whence I travelled by diligence to Geneva, with the bottle

containing the two Proteus under my thin coat, for fear of the water

freezing while crossing the Alps. At Geneva I had a few evening hours

to spare, which I spent at the theatre, and thence on by diligence to

Boulogne. It took me either seven days and eight nights, or conversely,

to reach Boulogne from Milan, and it was of course tiring to sit up and

be shaken in a diligence during that long time. My legs began to swell

before I reached Boulogne, but the two or three hours of lying down in

the Channel steamer quite restored them.

So I reached my home in Leamington safely and in good time, and my dear

kind father took my escapade humorously. He was pleased with it rather

than otherwise, for I had much to tell and had obviously gained a great

deal of experience. This little expedition proved to be an important

factor in moulding my after-life. It vastly widened my views of humanity

and civilisation, and it confirmed aspirations for travel which were

afterwards indulged.

CHAPTER V

CAMBRIDGE

Trinity College—First vacation at the Lakes—Second vacation

at Aberfeldy—College friends—Entire breakdown in health—Third

vacation in Germany—My father’s death

It was a notable day in my life when, in the year 1840, escorted by

my father on the top of a stage coach, I caught my first view of the

principal buildings of Cambridge. There was no railway to Cambridge

then. I had been entered at Trinity College, where rooms were assigned

to me on the first floor of B. New Court. My tutor was J. W. Blakesley

(1808-1885), an accomplished classical scholar, contemporary with

Tennyson and his set, and subsequently Dean of Lincoln. The then Master

of the College, who, however, resigned his post after the close of my

first term, was Christopher Wordsworth (1774-1846), brother of the poet

and father of three distinguished classical scholars,—John; Charles,

Bishop of St. Andrew’s; and Christopher, the headmaster of Harrow. The

biographies of them all appear in the _Dict. Nat. Biog._ I found but

few old friends among the undergraduates besides Matthew Boulton, but

gradually fell into my place. I soon became conscious of the power

and thoroughness of the work about me, as of a far superior order to

anything I had previously witnessed. At the same time I wondered at its

narrowness, for not a soul seemed to have the slightest knowledge of,

or interest in, what I had acquired in my medical education and what we

have since learnt to call Biology. The religious dogmas were of a more

archaic type than I had latterly learnt to hold. I thought that just

as the medicals wanted the thoroughness of the classicals and of the

mathematicians, so these wanted at least an elementary knowledge of what

was familiar to the medicals. Great and salutary changes have long since

been introduced, and the above criticism, which was perfectly just at the

time, is now, I believe and trust, almost wholly out of date.

I stood far behind the majority of my fellow-freshmen in classics, but

less so in elementary mathematics, which were then much neglected in

schools; for I had an innate love of them, and had indulged in some

little private study. I pass lightly over my first year, which was

a period of general progress, without much of note, until the first

vacation arrived.

I then formed one of a reading party who went to Keswick in Cumberland,

and had rooms in the same house with the two tutors, Matheson and Eddis.

It was called “Browtop,” and was then a detached villa with a wide

prospect, situated in the district that now bears that name. One other

pupil lived there also; the rest had lodgings in the town. Being in

those years careless of rain and little sensitive to the enervating air

of the Lake District, I found myself perfectly happy. The hills being

moderate in height and the distances small, an afternoon sufficed easily

for most of the excursions, so the whole morning was left free for

reading. Matheson, the mathematical tutor, was a well-known Fellow of

Trinity College, a considerable pianist and a good walker. He also knew

the country and many of its residents. Among these was the Rev. Frederic

Myers (1811-1851), Vicar of Keswick, who had married into the Marshall

family, and who showed me much kindness. He was father to the as yet

unborn poet and spiritualist, Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901), and his

house was a social centre.

I saw a most amusing scene in its drawing-room, which those who recollect

the formidable presence of Dr. Whewell will appreciate. All male animals,

including men, when they are in love, are apt to behave in ways that

seem ludicrous to bystanders. Whewell was not exempt from the common

lot, though he had to sustain his new dignity of “Master of Trinity.”

He was then paying court to the lady who became his first wife, and his

behaviour reminded me irresistibly of a turkey-cock similarly engaged. I

fancied that I could almost hear the rustling of his stiffened feathers,

and did overhear these sonorous lines of Milton rolled out to the lady

_à propos_ of I know not what, “cycle and epicycle, orb and orb,” with

hollow o’s and prolonged trills on the r’s.

The following skit indicates the feeling in regard to Whewell’s manner

that was current in Cambridge after he had assumed his office. I was

reminded of it not so very many months ago, by the late Lord Kelvin:—

“You may roam where you will through the realms of infinity

And find nothing so great as the Master of Trinity.”

Those who have read Whewell’s Life, which was written by a loving hand

and dwells mainly on his kindly, domestic character, will gather little

idea of the rough power of the man and his too frequent overbearing

attitude. In after-days he invited me to the Lodge, where I found him

most unexpectedly gracious.

It may be worth mentioning that at the time of which I am writing, brakes

to carriages were unknown in England except in the Lake Country, where

the many hills made it difficult to travel without restraint, unless by

frequently stopping to put on or take off the drag. Their use gradually

spread, as the first sentimental opposition to them subsided. A near

relative of my own, who was a devoted whip and drove his own four-horse

drag for many years, was at first contemptuous towards brakes, but soon

changed his mind, and ever afterwards used one.

One of the longer excursions was to Scawfell, where I found a small

encampment of ordnance surveyors with theodolite and heliostat. Their

immediate object was to obtain by direct observation the bearing of

Snowdon, ninety-six miles off (as I think they said), to form the side

of one of their principal triangles. A corresponding station was set

up on the top of Snowdon, whence after many days’ waiting in vain the

long-wished-for star of light reflected from the sun by the mirror on

Snowdon, became faintly but clearly visible through the telescope at

Scawfell. It had been seen on three days altogether, two of which were

successive. The obstruction to light by a few miles of mist, etc., in the

lower layers of the atmosphere, contrasts forcibly with the ease with

which every detail of the far more distant moon becomes visible when

risen but a few degrees above the horizon.

Talking of such things reminds me of an elementary but very neat little

problem that was set about this time in one of the College examination

papers. It has often served me as a rough reminder of the constants

involved, so I give it:—

“The tops of two masts, each ten feet above calm water, are just visible

to one another at a distance of eight miles; what is the diameter of the

earth? Aerial refraction is not to be taken into account.” I leave its

solution to the reader.

One of the features of my stay at the Lakes was the wrestling and other

field sports, then much more homely in their accessories than they are

now. I took lessons from one of the family of Ivens, among whom were many

noted wrestlers. My teacher was the light-weight champion of the year. It

was interesting to observe the wary approach and half-catchings of the

opponents before one of them succeeded in grappling; then the tug-of-war

began.

An event occurred at this time closely similar in many respects, but

not in its most painful details, to one previously related by De

Quincey in his reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge, as having occurred

in the Lake District in the early years of last century. I was quite

ignorant of it till very lately, when I happened to be reading his book.

My story is that of a Polish Count, O., who appeared at Keswick with

scant introductions, took a house, and made himself most agreeable. I

fell at once under his influence, for he seemed to me extraordinarily

accomplished. He had all sorts of books and instruments, and even a

tame monkey! So the Count throve and prospered for a while. But a lady

resident in the neighbourhood who had been connected in her youth with

one of the German Courts, and who studied the Almanach de Gotha and

the like, insisted that the Count’s claims to the title were totally

unfounded. So a small warfare raged. In the meantime the Count won the

affections of a simple girl, the orphan child of a somewhat wealthy

“statesman,” that is what we should call a yeoman farmer. He married

her, and afterwards ran away with as much of her money as he could get

hold of, leaving her with the questionable title of Countess as her only

consolation. This finale occurred after I had left.

I grieve deeply that I knew little at that time of the Lake Poets, except

Byron’s lines on the correct poetical creed—

“Thou shall believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;

Thou shall not trust in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey....”

In consequence, I made no effort to obtain the honour of seeing and

possibly receiving some slight introduction to any one of its then

living members. Neither did I ever see Dr. Arnold, though I walked with

Strickland, one of our reading party and a former pupil of his, as far as

his door, which he entered to spend half an hour with him, while I waited

and envied.

Strickland was the son of a well-known Yorkshire baronet. He joined me

in many pleasant walks from London after my college days, of which I

especially recollect one in the then rural Isle of Wight, when there was

little more than a single house at Shanklin, and that was its pretty,

rustic hotel. The times of travel from London so fitted in, that the walk

from Ryde about Easter-time began well before twilight, and we reached

Shanklin not too late to be taken in and to thoroughly enjoy the moonlit

evening. Strickland was a strong swimmer, but he got into some difficulty

next morning owing to the surf and undercurrents at the place where he

entered the sea. He returned safely to shore, to my great relief, but

much tired from long battling with the water.

His end was tragic. It occurred in North America, when winter had

just set in, near some well-known watering-place whose name I forget,

separated by a low range of hills from another watering place about

sixteen miles off. The road between the two was perfectly simple and

easy in summer, but not so in the snowdrifts and darkness of winter.

Strickland would attempt it, though much was said to dissuade him: he

never reached his destination. A relief party tracked his wanderings. He

seemed to have acted as one demented by the hardship, for he had stripped

off his clothes and thrown them away, one after the other, even his

boots, so that his dead body was almost wholly undressed. That was the

story I heard from two persons.

On returning to Cambridge after the first long vacation, I was put

steadily to mathematical work, coming at length under that most

distinguished Cambridge tutor, William Hopkins (1793-1866), mathematician

and geologist. He kindly took a good deal of interest in me and gave me

much encouragement, but the hopes he fostered were shattered by serious

illness, which precluded severe study during my third year, as will be

mentioned farther on. At a later date I found myself his colleague as

Joint Secretary to the British Association, but his health had by then

declined and his fine intellect begun to fail. I never had a tutor whom I

reverenced and loved so entirely as Hopkins.

It was early in my second year that I entered into a close friendship

with two Etonians. The one was Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam (1824-1850),

the younger son of the historian Henry Hallam (1777-1859) and brother

to Arthur Hallam (1811-1833), the subject of Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_.

The other friend was F. Campbell, the eldest son of Lord Campbell

(1779-1861), then Lord Chief-Justice, and afterwards Lord Chancellor. F.

Campbell became in later years, through succession, Lord Stratheden and

Campbell. I owe much to each of these fast friends, but in different ways.

Harry Hallam had a singular sweetness and attractiveness of manner, with

a love of harmless banter and paradox, and was keenly sympathetic with

all his many friends. He won the Second Chancellor’s Medal. Through

him I became introduced to his father’s house, still shadowed by the

sudden death of his son Arthur and of a daughter. Mr. Hallam was very

kind to me, and the friendship of him and of his family was one of the

corner-stones of my life-history. I met many eminent persons at his

house. Harry Hallam, like his brother and sister, died suddenly and

young, to my poignant grief. His death occurred while I was away in

South Africa. I have visited the quiet church at Clevedon where all the

Hallams lie, each memorial stone bearing a briefly pathetic inscription,

and kneeling alone in a pew by their side, spent the greater part of a

solitary hour in unrestrained tears.

F. Campbell had set for himself an ideal of public life that was too

high for his powers, and many would say that he greatly failed in it. It

may be so, but he had what I prized beyond anything else, a capacity for

steady friendship, and a disposition unalloyed by pettiness. I always

found help when consulting him about any of my own difficulties, because

he put things in fresh lights and always with noble intent. He died in

1893. Through being his friend, I was entertained with much kindness by

his father at Stratheden House, and received important help on more than

one occasion.

It was mainly through these two men, Hallam and Campbell, that I first

became acquainted with most of the ablest undergraduates of that day. Of

these Maine (Sir Henry S. Maine, 1822-1888) ranked the highest. He had

a great charm of manner with much beauty of feature, and was one of the

few non-Trinity men who became thoroughly at home in Trinity itself. In

later years, when he had become an eminent jurist and had filled with

distinction the highest legal post in India, I used to enjoy long talks

with him at the Athenæum Club, mostly on topics connected with Primitive

Culture.

The subject of prehistoric civilisation was novel even so late as the

early fifties, and was discussed independently from two different

sides. The line of approach that Maine followed was to investigate the

customs of the so-called Aryan races. The other line was by the study

of living savage races, and of such inferences regarding the past as

might be drawn from implements and bones preserved in prehistoric graves

and caverns. The horizon of the Antiquarians was so narrow at about the

date of my Cambridge days, that the whole history of the early world was

literally believed, by many of the best informed men, to be contained

in the Pentateuch. It was also practically supposed that nothing more

of importance could be learnt of the origins of civilisation during

classical times than was to be found definitely stated in classical

authors.

Sir H. Maine considerably extended this narrow horizon through his close

analysis of classical writings in the light of his Indian experiences,

but he was always tempted to look on what was really a very advanced form

of civilisation as if it had been primitive, and thereby laid himself

open to violent attack. Among his opponents, J. F. MacLennan (1827-1881),

the author of _Marriage by Capture_, etc., was eminently impetuous, and

Maine, knowing that I was well acquainted with him, begged me to do

what I could to moderate his controversial tone; I tried in vain. This,

however, is travelling many years ahead. I had often occasion to consult

Sir H. Maine on subjects that I had then in hand, and always found him a

most helpful adviser.

It is difficult to select illustrative episodes of my Cambridge days.

William Johnson Cory, then known as Johnson of King’s (1823-1892), “Poet,

and Master at Eton,” was a remarkable character. He was easily the first

classic of his year, as tested by the brilliancy of his performance

in gaining the Craven Scholarship soon after joining the University.

At that time he was eccentric, very short-sighted, and Johnsonian in

appearance, but these peculiarities wore off so much that, on his calling

on me some years afterwards, fashionably dressed and polished in manner,

I did not at first recognise him. He took an active part in a small

Epigram Club which flourished for a while and then ceased, but which gave

rise to some good verses. I recollect the roll of the first line of one

by Maine—“King Daniel of Derrinane ...”—that referred to a recent action

of Daniel O’Connell.

Tom Taylor (1817-1880), “Dramatist and Editor of _Punch_,” was full of

vigour and versatility, but a few years older than those of whom I have

been speaking. He had recently been elected Fellow of the College. In

those days _Punch_ was newly started, and Tom Taylor thought he could do

better, so he founded a weekly comic paper called _Puck_, for which he

endeavoured to obtain contributors. It was fairly good, but did not live

long. Many years later he became editor of the very periodical he then

wished to crush.

I saw much of Joseph and E. Kay, half-brothers of Sir James

Kay-Shuttleworth (1804-1877), who was the “Founder of English Popular

Education.” Joseph Kay (1821-1878), “Economist,” was appointed

“Travelling Bachelor,” a University post that at that time attracted

little competition, because the conditions attached to its tenure were

inconvenient to most rising men. Its possession, therefore, carried

little weight. But Joseph Kay utilised to the full his position of

“Travelling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge” in obtaining help

abroad, and he wrote and published a valuable Report with that title,

which attracted much attention. He took in it an opposite position to one

previously occupied by Whewell. I beg to be pardoned if my memory plays

tricks, but my impression is that Whewell’s efforts to subdue his own

indignation at being bearded in this way by a mere “Travelling Bachelor”

were all the more amusing because he was impotent to retort. Joseph Kay

was perfectly in order in asserting his rank; he was judged by competent

outsiders to have written very ably, and he was no longer a resident in

Trinity College within immediate reach of Whewell’s wrath.

E. Kay (1822-1897), afterwards Lord Justice of Appeal, had rooms on the

same staircase as myself, and we wasted a great deal of time together,

both in term and in my second summer vacation. But however idle he may

have been at College, he richly made up for it afterwards by hard and

steady legal work, out of which he finally emerged as a Judge with a

large fortune made at the Bar.

Charles Buxton (1823-1871), son of the philanthropist Sir T. Fowell

Buxton (1786-1845) and father of the present Postmaster-General, was

another intimate friend. He was a far-off relative of my own, and one of

the most favourable examples of a Rugby product under Dr. Arnold. Other

similar examples of highly favourable products occur at once to the

memory, such as Dean Stanley, Dean Lake, and Walrond, but unquestionably

the common opinion of Cambridge undergraduates then assigned the epithet

of “prig” to most Rugby boys. I can exactly recall the combination of

qualities that occasioned the offence; they were partly an unconscious

Phariseeism combined with want of “go,” and partly a Rugby voice and

manner. Eton boys were rated far higher than they. I do not recollect

whether any generalisation was formed at that time in respect to Harrow

boys, who were then few in number. To return to Charles Buxton, he gave

me the idea of perfection in respect to a highly honourable class of

mind. This did not include exceptional brilliance, such as characterised

some of the men mentioned above, but it did include most of the manly

virtues and as much common sense as was consistent with a charming dash

of originality. His elder brother Fowell, who has lately died, had rooms

on the same staircase as myself.

W. G. Clark (1821-1878) was another contemporary of whom I saw much

then and in after years. His strong bent had been towards diplomacy,

but he wanted the fortune and connections necessary for success in such

a career, so his desire remained unfulfilled. He loved to bring back

impressions of travel, whether made in the Peloponnesus or in the rear

of Garibaldi. He was Public Orator of the University for many years, and

Vice-Master of Trinity College. Consequently, as a matter of course in

those days, he was an ordained clergyman. But he chafed under the fetters

of orthodoxy, and became a prominent member of the small group of men

who procured the Act that allowed clergymen to retire from their office

without retaining clerical disabilities. His career was clouded towards

its end by insidious mental disease. He lived long retired in almost

complete solitude in a Yorkshire inn, but sometimes sent bits of elegant

Greek poetry to old classical friends, as to Justice Denman. A small

volume of poems published under his initials contains some gems. He had

lost a favourite male cousin in youth whose death affected him deeply and

gave the chief motive to the book of poems in question.[1]

My second long vacation was spent with a reading party in Aberfeldy,

in Perthshire, under the guidance of two tutors as usual, of whom one

was Arthur Cayley (1821-1895), whose mathematical work soon gained a

world-wide reputation. He and Sylvester (1814-1897) became the two

leading mathematicians of England. Cayley was reputed to be the more

solid, Sylvester the more daring and brilliant. I saw much of Sylvester

a dozen or more years after the date of which I now speak, and for a

brief time also at the English Lakes. He was a great friend of Cayley,

and corresponded with him very often about his own numerous new ideas,

becoming subsequently depressed or elated according to the tenor of the

answer. Over and over again I have heard him say, “I must send this

to Cayley,” or again, “Cayley has pointed out a difficulty.” He was

charmingly naïve, and both were men of prodigious mental power. When the

time came for adjudging the Copley Medal to one or other of them, the

highest honour of the Royal Society, which it annually bestows on the

foremost man in science of whatever branch, in all Europe, there was much

discussion as to which of the two should first have it. I was a member of

its Council at the time; the opinions of most of us, including myself,

were of course largely guided by those of the eminent mathematicians who

were also members of it, and by the result of private inquiries. The

opinions in favour of Sylvester prevailed; Cayley received the Medal a

few years subsequently.

Never was a man whose outer physique so belied his powers as that of

Cayley. There was something eerie and uncanny in his ways, that inclined

strangers to pronounce him neither to be wholly sane nor gifted with

much intelligence, which was the very reverse of the truth. Again, he

appeared so frail as to be incapable of ordinary physical work; not a

bit of it. One morning he coached us as usual and dined early with us at

our usual hour. The next morning he did the same, all just as before,

but it afterwards transpired that he had not been to bed at all in the

meantime, but had tramped all night through over the moors to and about

Loch Rannoch. As to memory, I found by pure accident that he could repeat

poetry by the yard so to speak, and that of many kinds. His shy, retiring

ways did no justice whatever to his gigantic mental capacity.

I was, in a very humble way, able to compare the work of various

mathematical teachers with that of Cayley. The latter moved his symbols

in battalions, along broad roads, careless of short cuts, and he managed

them with the easy command of a great general. The very look of his

papers, written in firm handwriting and well proportioned lengths of

line, bore thoroughness and accuracy on their face. This is not over

fanciful. William Spottiswoode (1825-1883), himself a mathematician

and President of the Royal Society, of whom I shall have to speak

later, laid much stress on the general aspect of mathematical papers as

indicating in many ways the value of their contents, and I could quote

other authorities to a similar effect.

We had a pleasant and a social time at Aberfeldy, for the residents

in the neighbourhood were very kind to us. Sir Neil and Lady Menzies

of Menzies Castle, to whom I had an introduction, lived amid Highland

surroundings. One of these consisted of a full-dressed piper who strutted

up and down the long hall during dinner with the self-sufficiency of the

drum-major of a regimental band, squirling on his abominable instrument.

But there was also an abundance of Southern culture.

The visit of the Queen to Lord Breadalbane at the neighbouring Castle

of Taymouth gave rise to the following permanent impression on me. On

returning to my rooms after a walk, I found all my books and things taken

away and replaced by the gear of a cavalry officer, who was sitting

uninvited at my own table as lord and master of it. I could hardly

contain my wrath, but he was courteous and amused, though firm. He was

billeted there, consequently I must give way and yield my occupancy to

him. He had been told there was another room available for me to which my

things had been taken, but go I must and at once. This little incident

made me realise the odiousness and too probable insolence of military

rule, and the lesson sank deep. I gained on the spot a Quaker-like

repugnance to the sight of the accoutrements of a soldier, that exists to

this day under certain conditions, and its source is still recognisable.

On returning to Cambridge the old life recommenced, but on an enlarged

scale, and more friends were made, among whom were George Denman

(1819-1896), afterwards a Judge, and the son of Lord Chief-Justice

Denman (1779-1854). He combined classical capacity with power of muscle

and endurance, both in a very high degree, for he was Senior Classic of

his year and Stroke Oar of the University crew. He lived a double life,

warily looking after his own boat crew, the First Trinity, and joining

their rollickings in order to keep them within bounds, but doing hard

mental work at other hours. I think he was perhaps the most respected

of all the undergraduates. In after years he told me the following

extraordinary anecdote of Macaulay’s memory. He, Denman, had obtained the

prize for Greek verse and had to recite his composition. Macaulay was a

guest at Trinity Lodge and heard the recitation. Some years after, when

Denman had half forgotten the occurrence and imperfectly recollected what

he had then written, he was introduced to Macaulay, who exclaimed at

once, “Why, it was you who recited those verses,” which he straightway

repeated.

Memories so crowd on me that I find it difficult to stop. Something ought

to have been said of a singularly attractive man with quaint turns of

thought, H. Vaughan Johnson, who lived on the same staircase as myself,

and who collaborated in legal work with E. Kay, of whom I have already

spoken. He married a sister of my friend, then F. Campbell, afterwards

Lord Stratheden and Campbell.

Also I should mention W. F. Gibbs, who became tutor to the then Prince

of Wales, now King Edward VII. Gibbs obtained his Trinity Scholarship

at the same time as F. Gell, who was afterwards Bishop of Madras. Gibbs

was gifted with agility; Gell was very short-sighted, and the reverse of

agile, but he possessed a grand nose, the finest I have ever seen, and

a glory to the College. These two, as Gibbs told me, exuberant with joy

from gaining their scholarships, rushed down the avenue of limes at the

back of the College and through the gate at the end, where a row of low

bars confronted them; Gibbs, who led, jumped lightly over them, but Gell,

who followed, blundered, tripped, fell heavily on his face, and ruined

his grand nose for ever. The bars are still there; whenever I pass that

way I recall the tragedy.

Two events may be mentioned to show how long the duelling spirit

lingered. One was a row at the Union which nearly dismembered it. I

partly forget how it originated, and it would hardly be worth while

to record it if I did. It culminated in the formation of two fiercely

opposed parties, P. and C., and by a leading member of the C. party

being bludgeoned in the dark by two members of the P. party. They had

awaited his exit from the dark staircase leading from his rooms into

Neville Court. The tumult that this caused among the already excited

undergraduates is barely conceivable. The C. party, to which I belonged,

formed itself into a Committee and sent to an Indian officer, then living

with his family in Cambridge, entreating him to come and advise us how to

act. The officer himself happened to be delayed for half an hour, but he

sent in advance, quite as a matter of course, a neat box containing a

pair of duelling pistols ready for use.

I may add that a special meeting of the Union was forthwith called, for

which it was obviously necessary to provide an exceptionally strong

but neutral President. A man known as “First Trinity” Young (I forget

his Christian name), who died in early life or he might have highly

distinguished himself, was selected for the purpose, and he executed

admirably his most difficult task. It gave me a lesson in administration.

He began with a brief but emphatic request for cordial support from both

sides, adding that every question had more than one aspect. Humorous

but apt remarks were thrown out by him now and then. An equally patient

hearing was given to all parties, and a few occasional interruptions were

firmly repressed. The meeting parted with its members much more disposed

towards working relations than before; so the extremity of the crisis was

passed.

Its consequence was, however, the constitution of an opposition society,

called the “Historical,” in which more attention should be paid to

decorum and to the amenities of debate than had latterly been customary

in the Union. About sixty members joined it, and, partly because I was

then living out of College in a house where there was a possible meeting

room, I was asked to preside, which I did. My old friend Dr. H. Holden

(1823-1896), with whom I was speaking some few years ago of this very

incident, assured me that among the active members of the “Historical”

was Stanley, afterwards the 15th Earl of Derby (1826-1893). He entered

the University not long before I quitted it, during, I suppose, my

absence of one term from Cambridge through illness. Anyhow, I do not in

the least recollect his presence.

Speaking of the still lingering practice of duelling, C. Bristed, an

American who came to Cambridge for a couple of years or so, and whose

racy ways made him everywhere an acceptable guest, had a strange

experience. Some few years after we had left the University, F. Campbell

asked us both to dine with him at Stratheden House, where he was at the

moment the only member of his family in residence. Bristed gave us there

the full account of a duel in which he had unexpectedly become engaged.

It occurred near a German watering-place that lay within a short distance

of French territory. He had been criticising his future opponent pretty

freely in a local paper, with the result that on leaving church with

his young wife, where they had just joined in taking the Sacrament, a

note was handed to him containing a challenge, and suggesting a place in

French territory for the encounter. There seemed no other feasible course

than to accept that most untimely challenge, which he did. On arriving at

the ground, the combatants were placed 40 paces apart, with instructions

to walk towards one another, each to fire his one shot whenever he

thought proper. Bristed, who was rather short-sighted, said that his

opponent looked absurdly far away, and that he considered the safest plan

for himself was to “draw” his adversary’s shot before they came nearer

together, which he did. He fired harmlessly, and a harmless shot came in

reply. All the time he was recounting this very irregular proceeding, I

kept the corner of my eye fixed on a portrait of the Lord Chief-Justice,

that hung opposite, and thought how incongruous the conversation was with

its presence.

I received a kindly welcome from time to time after leaving Cambridge,

in the homes of not a few of my fellow-undergraduates. One was that

of Robert, afterwards Sir Robert Dalyell. His father, Captain Sir

William Dalyell, was a naval veteran with a scar across his face left

by a severe gash, who had quarters in Greenwich Hospital as one of the

Captains in command, the constitution of Greenwich Hospital being then

totally different from what it is now. The family consisted of himself,

Lady Dalyell, and their two daughters. Numerous friends appeared every

Sunday. We visitors walked and had tea, spending healthful and delightful

summer afternoons, usually returning to London by river. The life of a

young bachelor in not over elegant lodgings is vastly cheered by such

occasional outings. They give great pleasure all round with very little

expenditure either of exertion or of cost.

The family of Crompton Hutton, who lived at Putney Park, were most kind

in a similar way, to myself, to E. Kay, and many others. That family

was soon sadly broken up by deaths. One of the merriest of the sisters

in those days was the wife, and latterly the widow, of Lord Lingen, who

herself has died since I first wrote these lines. Lord Lingen was, I need

hardly add, for a long time one of the most valuable civil servants of

his country, first at the Education Office and afterwards at the Treasury.

It was during my third year at Cambridge that I broke down entirely in

health and had to lose a term and go home. I suffered from intermittent

pulse and a variety of brain symptoms of an alarming kind. A mill seemed

to be working inside my head; I could not banish obsessing ideas; at

times I could hardly read a book, and found it painful even to look at a

printed page. Fortunately, I did not suffer from sleeplessness, and my

digestion failed but little. Even a brief interval of complete mental

rest did me good, and it seemed as if a long dose of it might wholly

restore me. It would have been madness to continue the kind of studious

life that I had been leading. I had been much too zealous, had worked

too irregularly and in too many directions, and had done myself serious

harm. It was as though I had tried to make a steam-engine perform more

work than it was constructed for, by tampering with its safety valve and

thereby straining its mechanism. Happily, the human body may sometimes

repair itself, which the steam-engine cannot.

As it had become impossible for me to continue reading for mathematical

honours, I abandoned all further intention of trying for them, and

occupied part of my remaining time at Cambridge in attending medical

lectures to fill up the necessary quota of attendances that should

qualify for a medical degree. I spent my third long vacation in

travelling with my sister Emma in Germany. We stayed some weeks in

Dresden, where we joined the Hallams and accompanied them during a little

further travel, and then I took my sister round by Vienna and back home.

Those were days of travelling by voiturier and diligence.

There was a good deal of talk at that time about animal magnetism. Its

practice in Saxony was forbidden by law, but an Austrian acquaintance

in Dresden invited me to his house across the frontier, where I saw

the elementary part of its practice, namely, its inducing catalepsy

and insensibility to pain. I afterwards practised it at home, and

magnetised some eighty persons in this way; but it is an unwholesome

procedure, and I have never attempted it since. One experience was,

however, of interest. I had been assured that success was the effect of

strength of will on the part of the magnetiser, so at first I exerted

all the will-power I possessed, which was fatiguing. I then, by way of

experiment, intermitted a little, looking all the time in the same way

as before, and found myself equally successful. So I intermitted more

and more, and at last succeeded in letting my mind ramble freely while I

maintained the same owl-like demeanour. This acted just as well. The safe

conclusion was that the effect is purely subjective on the part of the

patient, and that will-power on the part of the operator has nothing to

do with it.

A main object of giving the foregoing brief notices of notable persons

with whom I had the privilege of being acquainted at Cambridge, is to

show the enormous advantages offered by a University to those who care to

profit by them. The body of undergraduates contains a very large majority

of men of mediocre gifts and tastes, but it has also a strong infusion

of the highest intellects of their age and country, picked out of all

the schools of England. Among any body of young educated Englishmen

collected at random, some few will probably be found who are destined

to rise to distinction, but among a group of those who are ranked as the

foremost in a University, more than one half of them will do so.

For my own part, I had hoped to take respectable mathematical honours,

though perhaps it was never in my power to do so, notwithstanding the

assurances of my eminent tutor, Mr. Hopkins. But the utter breakdown of

my health in my third year, as already explained, made further study of

a severe kind impossible. I therefore followed my bent in reading what

I could, and my time was by no means wasted. I contented myself with

a Poll Degree. Judge therefore of my surprise a few years ago, while

passing a winter on the Riviera, when a telegram reached me saying I had

been elected to the rare honour of an Honorary Fellowship in Trinity

College. I thought at first it must be a mistake, but it was not. Nay

more, hearing that a copy of a portrait recently made of me by the late

Charles Furse (see frontispiece) would be acceptable, I had one made and

offered it to the authorities of the College. It now hangs in its Hall

among those of men with whom I feel it the highest possible honour to be

associated in any way.

I must recur briefly to the close of my medical education. As already

mentioned, I attended some lectures during one term at Cambridge, but had

not even admittance to the then small Addenbrook Hospital. I have little

to tell about this period that would interest others than myself. It was

thought well that I should complete my course in London at St. George’s,

for the purpose of seeing new conditions of medical treatment. I attended

these necessarily in a desultory way, on account of an impending

domestic sorrow. My dear father’s originally fine constitution, long

tried by severe asthma and gout, had at length seriously given way. He

required continual medical and surgical treatment and trusted in me, so

to him I went. The end came in October 1844 at Hastings. His remains had

to be taken to Leamington. It was a wretched journey, for the railway was

not even then completed the whole way.

The effect of his death was to remove the main bond that kept our family

together, and we soon became more or less separated. Two of my sisters

married within the year, and I found myself with a sufficient fortune to

make me independent of the medical profession. So my status of pupilhood

was closed, and I had henceforth to be my own director. Being much upset

and craving for a healthier life, I abandoned all thought of becoming a

physician, but felt most grateful for the enlarged insight into Nature

that I had acquired through medical experiences.

CHAPTER VI

EGYPT AND THE SOUDAN

Family matters—Malta and Alexandria—Nile—Korosko—Berber by

desert—Boat to Khartum and White Nile—Bayouda Desert to

Dongola—Wady Halfa and Cairo—Recent visit to Professor Petrie’s

camp at Abydos

The home side of my surroundings has been only slightly alluded to,

not that it was of small importance to myself, but because it belonged

to a different phase of my life from that with which I am here chiefly

concerned. When I had outgrown the tuition of my sister Adele, I led in

one sense a solitary life. For though I joined my other two unmarried

sisters in their social amusements, I was always treated by them and

their companions as a boy, and I felt during this time like an only child

with aunts. Their affection to me was deep, so was mine to them, but it

was not and could not be reciprocated on equal terms. But I received

in full measure the priceless treasure of a home, in which each member

knew the essential characteristics, good and bad, of all the others, and

who loved each other all the same, and would support him or her through

thick and thin. The younger of my brothers, Erasmus, was mostly away;

in the first instance in the navy, afterwards in farming his property

in Somersetshire, or again in service as an officer in the Militia. My

elder brother Darwin was a great favourite among his friends from his

early life onwards. He used me as his fag when I was a boy, and taught

me to be fairly smart. I imbibed many common-sense maxims from him,

but our ideals of life differed to an almost absurd degree: he had not

the slightest care for literature or science, and I had no taste for

country pursuits. Our differences of temperament became more marked the

older we grew. These few remarks, in connection with what has previously

been said, will give a supplementary idea of what my surroundings had

been during much of my boyhood. It was now the year 1845, when I was

twenty-three years old, and the acuteness of my late bereavement had

passed away.

After the necessary legal business was finished, the members of the

family gradually adapted themselves to their new conditions. My sister

Emma lived thenceforth with my mother, whose house, whether at Claverdon

or Leamington, I always thought of as “home.” Emma soon became my

loving and beloved correspondent, continuing so during the remaining

seventy years of her long life, ever devoted to my interests and keenly

sympathetic. I was indeed fortunate in possessing such an unselfish and

affectionate sister. My sister Lucy was in suffering health, from the

results of acute rheumatic fever when a child, and lived only three

years longer. My sisters Bessy and Adele were then either married or

about to be married; my eldest brother Darwin was married and living

with his young wife and her mother, Mrs. Philips, at her country house,

called “Edstone,” between Stratford-on-Avon and Henley-on-Arden; and my

second brother Erasmus was, as already said, at his estate at Loxton in

Somersetshire.

I was therefore free, and I eagerly desired a complete change; besides,

I had many “wild oats” yet to sow. So I started on travel, this time

to Egypt. At Malta I found my old friend Robert Frere, of whom I have

already spoken. He was acting medically towards his uncle, Hookham Frere,

much as I had been acting towards my own father. Hookham Frere was too

unwell to be seen, or I should greatly have valued the privilege of a few

words with so accomplished a man, whatever his diplomatic shortcomings

may have been. Not the less so because of the amusing parody written

jointly by himself and Canning of my grandfather Darwin’s _Loves of the

Plants_ under the title of _Loves of the Triangles_, which gave a _coup

de grâce_ to the turgid poetry that had become a temporary craze in my

grandfather’s time.

At Malta I took steamer to Alexandria, and found two Cambridge friends on

board, who had been travelling in Greece. They were Montagu Boulton, the

third and youngest brother of Matthew Boulton, and Hedworth Barclay, a

very distant kinsman of my own and the son of David Barclay of Eastwick

Park. We ultimately agreed to join. Boulton had a first-rate courier

named Evard, who had also been groom of the chamber to one of the

most fashionable of English families. Barclay had a good Greek cook,

Christopher, and I was to contribute a dragoman, which I did. His name

was Ali.

Mehemet Ali was at that time the ruler of Egypt. Barclay had an audience

of him, and received the usual firman entitling us to impress men to

pull up our boat at certain well-known places where the stream is

exceptionally strong. I myself saw the old greybeard driving, but that

was all. Shepherd’s Hotel then looked out upon rice-fields, and modern

Cairo did not exist, but Waghorn’s overland wagons to Suez had been

established. After some stay at Cairo, we hired a dahabeyah; Barclay

put on board a keg of his own porter, and so we started, intending to

live luxuriously and in grand style. We also engaged an Arab lad as

coffee-bearer and to make himself generally useful, who went by the name

of Bob. He turned out to be a lad of parts.

The mornings were delightful. We rolled out of our beds half awake and

tumbled ourselves into the river, climbing back very wide awake indeed

into the boat by help of the big rudder, to the exquisite enjoyment of

the first cup of coffee and a pipe. We chattered with Bob, the captain,

sailors, and others, and soon smattered in Arabic. Boulton studied it

classically as well, working very hard. So the voyage proceeded in the

usual way. We were pulled safely up the First Cataract, and onward we

went.

When near Korosko, men had to be impressed, but a person in a rather

shabby Egyptian dress, but of Egyptian rank as a Bey, claimed and

insisted on precedence. We were cross, and relieved our minds by the

use of uncomplimentary English words. But by the time we had walked

together to Korosko we had become fairly friendly, for he was a far more

interesting man than we had supposed, and had much to tell us in French.

He invited us to see his hut, where everything was perfectly clean and

well ordered. Small as it was, a scientific and literary air pervaded

it. There were maps, good books and scientific instruments of various

kinds, so my heart warmed towards him. Then he began to address us in

fairly good English, and made us understand that he was quite aware of

our phrases when we were cross, and that he forgave us, but did so in a

dignified way. There was one thing we could do well which he could not,

and that was to provide a really good dinner. Evard and the cook rose at

once to the occasion, and nothing could have been managed in better style

under the circumstances.

The stranger proved to be Arnaud Bey, one of the distinguished St.

Simonians who, having been banished from France, helped greatly to

civilise Egypt in the days of Mehemet Ali. He had just returned from a

long exploratory journey after gold and other valuable products in the

districts about the Blue Nile. It will be hard now for a reader to put

himself in the attitude of geographical ignorance that was then almost

universal in respect to those places. Arnaud said at last, “Why do you

content yourself like other tourists to go no farther than Wady Halfa?

Why not travel overland by camel from this very place, Korosko, to

Khartum? The Sheikh of the intervening Bishari Desert is in the village

at this very moment. I know him well, and can easily arrange that he

shall take you to Berber at moderate cost. You will then find your way by

boat to Khartum.” We were amazed at the proposition, for the very names

of those places were unknown to us. He drew a map on a small piece of

paper for us to keep, on which he marked bits of useful information. At

length, after hours of eating and drinking and talking, we fell wholly

into his plan. The Sheikh was sent for, and I shall never forget his

entrance. The cabin reeked with the smells of a recent carouse, when the

door opened and there stood the tall Sheikh, marked with sand on his

forehead that indicated recent prostration in prayer. The pure moonlight

flooded the Bacchanalian cabin, and the clear cool desert air poured in.

I felt swinish in the presence of his Moslem purity and imposing mien.

For all that, we soon came to terms, and were to start the day after the

morrow. The boat was to be sent to Wady Halfa under Bob in chief command

to await our return there, and we three and our three servants were to

travel into the unknown on the backs of beasts strange to our experience.

So it all befell.

[Illustration]

A more complete change can hardly be imagined than that from a luxurious

cabin to nightly open-air bivouacs on the cold sand. Our first day was

the customary march of little more than an hour, to be assured that

nothing needful had been omitted. The next day the real journey began.

The track we followed was presumably the same that has been followed

since the most ancient days; it bore marks of its continued use during

recent times in the whitened bones with which it was strewed. Sometimes

we came across a camel whose skin had not yet disappeared, but formed

a hollow shell including marrowless and porous bones. These desiccated

remains were of most unexpected lightness. My arm is far from strong, but

I easily lifted with one hand and held aloft the quarter of a camel in

this dried-up state.

The ribbed rocks looked like the bones of the earth from which all the

flesh, in the shape of soil and vegetation, had been blown away as

sand and dust. Travellers by the railway that now runs along that very

track can ill appreciate the effect the desert had on such as myself

at that time. Ali proved an excellent and devoted servant. I long bore

in mind his kindness to me on one bitterly cold night, for the nights

were sometimes extremely chill, in quietly taking off his own jacket and

wrapping it round my shivering body.

Many strangers joined our slowly moving caravan. One group was such as

is frequently seen on similar occasions; it consisted of a husband on

foot, with his wife and child mounted on a donkey, like the often-painted

subject of the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Another personage

was a middle-aged and rather mild-looking individual, who possessed

little more than a sword, and was on his way to Abyssinia, where some

fighting was expected with neighbouring savage tribes. He proposed to

take part in it, and to make his profit from the slaves he captured. He

was an old hand at this, and his businesslike account of the process was

explicit. It was a moot question with him on each occasion when a man had

been captured, whether to mutilate him at once or not. If so, the man

was apt to die, and would certainly require costly attention for a long

time; on the other hand, if he recovered, his market value was greatly

increased. I shall have a little to say later on of some results of the

particular slave-hunting expedition which this worthy person went to join.

A caravan yields so many strange experiences and affords so many

occasions of mutual helpfulness and of friendships, that it is easy to

understand the importance of the Hadj pilgrimage in uniting Moslems.

I have often wished that something of the sort could be revived among

ourselves, such as the famous Canterbury Pilgrimage of Chaucer, but the

religious motive for real pilgrimages is generally wanting in Protestant

countries. The Congresses of large itinerant societies like the British

Association, in some few respects may be considered as taking the place

of pilgrimages, but they want the long hours and days of open-air life,

hard exercise, and leisure.

After four days’ travel from morning to evening, we came to a half-way

place where a brack but drinkable water was to be had, which replaced

the redolent stuff that our water-skins afforded, and so on for four

more days, when we reached the Nile at Abu Hamed, having cut across its

huge bend. Oh! the delights to such tourists as we were, of a temporary

exemption from the discomforts of the desert, and of unlimited rations

of water. We travelled farther by the side of the Nile for another

three days or so, till Berber was reached, when we paid our dues and

said good-bye to the camels. The Governor of Berber was very civil; the

sherbet he gave us, though made from limes and not from lemons, tasted

heavenly. He gave me a monkey, and I bought another, and these two were

my constant companions on camel-back and everywhere else for many months,

until I reached England.

A boat had here to be hired to take us up to Khartum. We got one in

which the part below decks was much too low to stand in, and it swarmed

with cockroaches, but it sufficed. The people at Berber were unruly, and

so obstructive that the boatmen feared to enter with us into their own

boat. However, we showed determination, and pushed off into the stream,

with the result that first one and then another of the men ran alongside

and plunged into the water and swam to the boat and turned its head up

stream. We then set sail to Khartum.

In due time we passed Shendy, the scene of the recent massacre of Abbas

Pasha, a younger son of Mehemet Ali. He was sent to collect imposts and

to overawe the people. At Shendy he and his soldiers committed all sorts

of outrages, and finally he demanded the daughter of the Deftader (or

Tax-gatherer) in a form of marriage that was equivalent to temporary

concubinage, which was a grave insult to her father, the most important

man in the place. The Deftader was unable to resist; so he resigned

himself, but gave orders secretly. While Abbas Pasha with his suite were

at dinner and stupid with what they had drunk, the Pasha noticed that

great bundles of stalks of the native corn were being brought in and

stacked about the tent. He asked and was told that it was forage and

litter for his Highness’s horses. When enough of this straw had been

brought in, a signal was given to fire it, and every man who attempted

to break through was massacred, including of course Abbas himself. The

Deftader escaped to Abyssinia; something more of him will be said shortly.

Finally we reached Khartum, then a group of huts with a wagon-roofed

hall for the audiences of the Pasha. We heard of an extraordinary Frank,

believed to be English, who had arrived some weeks previously. We went

to call on him, knocked at the door, were told to enter, which we did,

and came into the presence of a white man nearly naked, as agile as a

panther, with head shorn except for the Moslem tuft, reeking with butter,

and with a leopard skin thrown over his shoulder. He was recognised at

once by my companions as an undergraduate friend, Mansfield Parkyns. He

had got into a College scrape, and, leaving Cambridge prematurely, found

his way to Abyssinia, where during years of adventure he had made friends

with the just-mentioned Deftader of Shendy, and was then acting as an

intermediary and the bringer of a substantial present whereby to obtain,

if possible, his forgiveness and restoration.

Of the many travellers whom I have known I should place Mansfield

Parkyns (1823-1894) as perhaps the most gifted with natural advantages

for that career. He easily held his own under difficulties, won hearts

by his sympathy, and could touch any amount of pitch without being

himself defiled. He was consequently an admirable guide in that then

sink of iniquity, Khartum. The saying was that when a man was such a

reprobate that he could not live in Europe, he went to Constantinople;

if too bad to be tolerated in Constantinople, he went to Cairo, and

thenceforward under similar compulsion to Khartum. Half a dozen or so of

these trebly refined villains resided there as slave-dealers; they were

pallid, haggard, fever-stricken, profane, and obscene. Mansfield Parkyns

complacently tolerated and mastered them all. The abominations of their

habitual conversation exceeded in a far-away degree any other I have ever

listened to, but it was clever. When one of them was out of the room, the

others freely related his adventures to us, in which some anecdote like

this was frequent. “So he said, ‘Let us be friends; come drink a cup of

coffee and smoke a pipe,’ then he put poison into the coffee.” There is

a gourd whose dried seeds are said to be poisonous and not very unlike

coffee in taste, which is particularly convenient in such cases. With all

their villainy there was something of interest in their talk, but I had

soon quite enough of it. Still, the experience was acceptable, for one

wants to know the very worst of everything as well as the very best.

Some few years later, when trade had thriven and Khartum had become

less barbarous, it was deemed expedient to appoint an English Consul,

partly to watch and report on matters connected with the slave trade.

Mr. Petherick, who had been an ivory dealer in the Soudan, was the first

to hold that post. I often saw him after his return; he was extremely

cheery, and apparently frank in conversation, but very reticent on much

that I wanted to hear. I could not discover what had been the end of my

villainous acquaintances, nor how far the society of Khartum had become

purified by the time he arrived there.

We had a few days still to spare, and Parkyns was glad to join us in a

short cruise up the White Nile. His birthday and mine proved to be the

same, and we had an appropriate jollification. Our house or hut looked

over the swift and broad Blue Nile on to the waste beyond, where pillars

of whirling sand were constantly forming at that time of year, February.

Many of them careered simultaneously, but soon dissipated. I have never

been caught in one; it would no doubt be disagreeable, but I never saw

one that behaved as if it were dangerous.

It was a strange sight on turning the corner where the two Niles meet,

to change from the Blue Nile, which sparkled and rushed like a clear

Highland river, into the stagnant and foul, but deep White Nile. We

sailed through mournful scenery up a width of water visited by great

flocks of pelicans. The river had few marked banks, but lapped upon

grassy shores like a flooded mere. The water was so stagnant, that when

we anchored for the night the offal thrown overboard by the cook hung

about the boat, and a man had to be sent each morning with a pitcher to

get less undrinkable water from a distance. Heads of hippopotami bobbed

up at times all about us in the mid river, but were very shy of approach.

At that date, I should have said there were crocodiles on nearly every

sandbank on the Nile below the Cataracts, for considerably more than half

of the way thence to Cairo.

Beyond the despondency caused by the air and the mournful character of

the scenery, I have little to say, except that our journey upwards was

concluded somewhat earlier than intended, through an adventure. One of

my two companions, attended by Parkyns, lay out at night to shoot a

hippopotamus, whose recent tracks were only too apparent. They returned

in the dark and very early morning in much excitement, and tried to make

us understand that we ought to wake up and return at once, for some

unintelligible reason. However, to please them, we yielded to their

insistence, roused up the crew and sailed homewards. It turned out, some

hours later, that the real reason was that my sportsman-companion had

shot, not a hippopotamus, but a cow that was coming down to the river

to drink. There really seemed no feasible way of making amends for the

mistake, and a certainty of clamour and excessive claims if we confessed

it. So we disappeared from that district, much as a pestilence would have

done.

Our return journey past Khartum was by our boat to Matemma, opposite to

Shendy, where we discharged it, and hired camels to take us a six days’

journey, I think, across the Bayouda Desert to Dongola. We had become by

that time used to camel-riding, we were well mounted, and travelled even

as much as eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, on more than one day.

The Polar Star and the pointers of the Great Bear served as the hand of a

huge sidereal clock to tell the weary time.

At length we reached our destination. It is the habit of dragomans to

tell fibs about their masters, to enhance their own importance; anyhow,

we were treated to a review as distinguished strangers. I then had

little experience with horses; Boulton was not a much better horseman

than myself. Barclay was, but even he found himself in difficulty when

sitting in a Turkish saddle with short stirrups and holding a rein armed

with so powerful a curb that it required the lightest of hands to use it

properly. However, we all passed the ordeal, without ludicrous mishap.

From Dongola we rode three days across the desert on the opposite side of

the Nile, to cut off a small bend, and thenceforward by the west side of

the Nile itself, so far as the very broken ground permitted. Semney was

a surprise; a compact little temple, high above a spot where the whole

Nile at that time of the year flowed through a channel so narrow that a

cricketer ought to be able to throw a stone across. I tried, but, being

bad at throwing, failed by a little. On the other hand, at the Sixth

Cataract, between Berber and Shendy, where the river is broad, I had

waded right across it to shoot ducks.

We had felt no small anxiety about the fate of our dahabeyah, but there

she was at Wady Halfa in spick and span order; Bob, that bit of a boy,

having risen to the level of his responsibilities and maintained perfect

discipline. It appeared that the rais, or captain, was once refractory,

but Bob boldly gave the order to the sailors to flog him, and flogged he

was by his own crew, and ate the bread of humility.

My excuses for speaking at such length about countries since so

familiarly known are that it will help to give some idea of how they

struck a tourist-traveller in the time of Mehemet Ali, upwards of sixty

years ago, and because this little excursion formed one of the principal

landmarks of my life. That chance meeting with Arnaud Bey had important

after-results to me by suggesting scientific objects to my future

wanderings. I often thought of writing to him in order to bring myself

to his remembrance, and to sincerely thank him, but no sufficiently

appropriate occasion arose, and it is now too late.

In the winter 1900-1901 I visited Egypt again, and, calling at the

Geographical Society there, learnt how important and honoured a place

Arnaud Bey had occupied in its history. He had died not many months

previously, and I looked at his portrait with regret and kindly

remembrance. Being asked to communicate a brief memoir to the Society at

its approaching meeting, I selected for my subject a comparison between

Egypt then and fifty years previously. I took that opportunity to express

my heartfelt gratitude to Arnaud, which posthumous tribute was all I had

the power to pay.

During this same visit to Egypt I spent one of the most interesting weeks

of my life at Professor Petrie’s camp. It was by pure chance that when

booking my place to Egypt, in the London office, I found Professor Petrie

on some similar errand. He then and there invited me and my niece to

join him and Mrs. Petrie at Abydos, where he and his very capable party

were about to excavate. Abydos lies on the western side of the Nile,

roughly one-third of the way between Thebes and Cairo. We were met at

the railway station by that most capable lady, then Miss, now Dr. Alice

Johnson, mounted on the one horse that the camp possessed, and who with

kurbash in hand and voluble Arabic extricated us quickly from a crowd of

troublesome natives, and rode with us a distance of eight miles or so to

the camp. This consisted of a row of mud huts with a space in front, the

whole enclosed with a low mud wall and a wicket gate. The pottery, etc.,

that had recently been dug up was arranged in front of the huts. They had

only mats for doors. One of the huts was the dining-room, and the others

were for members of the party, the farthest from the entrance being that

of Mr. and Mrs. Petrie. I was prepared for cold nights, but found them

more severe than I expected. Being little short of eighty years old, I

had lost much of the resisting power of youth, and heaped every scrap of

clothing I could find over my body, with only partial success. I amused

myself on one occasion by counting the number of layers of these that

lay on my chest, and found it to be seventeen. A single skin rug capable

of excluding the nimble dry air would have been worth more than half of

these flimsy coverings. Our host and hostess were peculiarly independent

of ordinary comfort, but the consumption of marmalade at their table was

enormous.

I had no idea before of the strenuous life led by a great excavator.

The mere digging can be delegated, but the rest seemed to occupy every

faculty of our hosts at full stretch from early morning to late evening

every day. There was drawing, copying, photographing, recording,

comparison of specimens, piecing of them together, discussing them and

planning new work, besides attending to the discipline of many men not

concentrated at one spot, but dispersed among different diggings.

An amusing scene occurred at a stated hour every morning, when the

fellahs who had found any curios and wanted to sell them were seated in

a long row at a fixed distance from the camp. They brought in rotation

what they had to sell. Professor Petrie knew by long experience exactly

how much the various articles would fetch if taken to the dealers in the

large towns, and offered that amount for what he cared to buy. The Arabs

quite understood the system, namely, that by accepting what was offered

they would get just as much as if they took a long journey in hopes of

a better bargain, so the traffic was quick. The objects were bought out

of funds variously provided, but the Egyptian Government reserved some

rights of purchase in the end.

The conversation at meal-time was usually most interesting. Much was

going on, and the originality and fertility of the ideas of Professor

Petrie and the ingenuity of his explanations were marvellous. The actual

digging was of course monotonous and laborious, but the faculties of

those of the party who superintended each locality were kept on the

alert. They had to record and to make maps as well as to keep the

labourers to their work, and to supervise them narrowly. At nightfall the

men, who had mostly worked for Professor Petrie during previous years,

returned to their own huts, a little way behind one corner of the camp,

and there they indulged about once a week in strange performances, not

unlike those of dancing and howling dervishes. Their nature seemed to

require occasional doses of these ebullitions.

We were fortunate at being present at the impressive feast of the full

moon, which included solemn chants. It was dignified in every respect,

and appeared to have a deeper religious significance than might have been

expected possible with these men.

CHAPTER VII

SYRIA

Beyrout—Fever—Death of dragoman at Damascus—Jaffa—Descent of

Jordan—Home

Our company parted at Alexandria. Barclay returned home, I went to Syria,

and Boulton desired to go farther East, to study Arabic and Oriental

modes of thought and expression. Our paths crossed only once in Syria.

Owing to misadventures, and to my great regret, I never saw him after. He

made his way to the British forces, then engaged in the siege of Mooltan,

and was the guest of their commander, General Whish. He stationed

himself, against advice, in a loopholed tower to witness the progress

of the fight, a matchlock ball penetrated his eye and killed him on the

spot. I heard the story many years afterwards from General Whish himself.

I sailed from Alexandria to Beyrout with my dragoman Ali and my two

pet monkeys. We were then put into quarantine, where Ali found a party

of negress girls who had been captured on the borders of Abyssinia

during the very fighting for which my acquaintance in the caravan was

bound. They had been taken to Beyrout _via_ the Red Sea. The girls were

delighted to talk to us of places known to them as well as to ourselves.

They seemed as merry as possible at the prospect of being sold and of

soon finding, each of them, a master and a home.

A journey so far as Khartum was then thought something of a feat, even

in Syria, and Ali, as I am convinced, greatly fibbed about my social

importance. It must have been on that account that the Governor of the

Quarantine, or whatever his title may have been, relaxed his restrictions

on my behalf so greatly as to call down severe newspaper criticism on

his acts of favouritism. In fact, we made a champagne picnic together in

two boats, under the sole condition of the party in the one not touching

any one in the other. For a similar reason, as I suppose, I was invited

and entertained in a most stately way at the palace of a Druse chief,

situated among the hills.

I bought travelling gear at Beyrout, and went inland to buy a pair

of horses for myself and Ali, because it was not easy to hire good

riding-horses, though baggage-horses could always be had. I set myself

up in style, with tent and extra walls, a canteen, and handsome coffee

and pipe apparatus. On arrival at the place where the horses were to be

bought, I camped on ground intersected with ditches of stagnant water—a

most insanitary-looking place. I caught there a sharp intermittent fever

which plagued me for years, and, though often kept in abeyance for a long

time together, has occasionally recurred most unexpectedly. It is only a

few weeks now since I had an attack of it. I returned with my horses to

Beyrout, but was too unwell to make much use of them.

After some wanderings, I settled in Damascus, at first in the house of

a medical man who enabled me to witness some gorgeous Jewish domestic

ceremonies. I also took elementary lessons in Hebrew at his house,

for which the little I knew of Arabic made an excellent preparation.

A sad grief befell me there in the death of my faithful dragoman,

Ali, through violent dysentery. All the last duties to the Moslem

dead, the washings, the shrouding, and the wailings, took place in the

courtyard. My own presence, as a Christian, at the funeral would have

been seriously resented by the Moslems, though I was able to arrange

about his tombstone. The sculptors here adopt a very simple process for

their illiterate workmen. A flat face is given to the stone, on which

the inscription is painted in black. Then all that is not painted is

chipped away. The populace at Damascus was then in a fanatical humour

and Christians had to be careful. There had been a frightful persecution

of Jews a little previously, and there were others of Christians

subsequently.

Ali had some trifling personal property, and wages were due to him.

I sent these to his wife in Cairo, who was the only relative I ever

heard him mention, together with a little present for herself, and

thought my duty fulfilled and that all was finished. On the contrary,

I had inadvertently roused a hornet’s nest of greedy claimants. An

official Arabic letter was sent to me demanding various payments to

numerous relatives, together with a threat of legal proceedings if not

attended to. My banker, to whom I referred it, advised me to get out of

the reach of the law as soon as I conveniently could, or I might find

myself fleeced, and perhaps entangled interminably. Fortunately, this

circumstance occurred about the time when I should have been returning to

England on my own account, so I “re-levanted,” if it may be so expressed.

Defaulters ordinarily “levant,” or run from Europe to the Levant; I ran

in the opposite direction.

At Damascus in the hot time of the year there was more than one delicious

retreat in public coffee-places with gardens, through which one of the

innumerable runnels of clear river water was conducted. I also took an

interesting ride through the outskirts of the town, where a vast amount

of dried apricot is prepared. It looks like greasy brown paper, is

wrapped in rolls, and is largely consumed. Each orchard has a smoothed

place like a small threshing-floor, as well as a big cauldron over an

oven into which the apricots are put. The resulting slush is ladled out

and spread over the floor; when it is sufficiently hardened, it is rolled

off it as if it were a sheet of oilcloth. The cost of preparation is

so small and the results so good that this manufacture might be found

remunerative in other countries where apricots grow in abundance.

I spent some happy days at Aden on the Lebanon, a little below the famous

cedars. The Sheikh was only too glad to entertain me, because one of the

miserable tribal fights was expected, and he was glad of the presence of

armed persons in his house, to protect it. Nothing, however, happened,

beyond a few harmless shots. I afterwards revelled in the glorious beauty

of the gorges leading down to the Mediterranean, and rank the view

down one of them as the very finest my eyes have ever rested on. Mr.

J. G. Frazer, in his _Adonis, Isis, and Osiris_, has collected similar

expressions from many other travellers.

I returned to Beyrout, where, finding one of my horses killed by a fall

over a cliff, and being unfit to enjoy or even to endure more riding, I

sold the other, and found my way to Jaffa on board an empty collier. The

part of its deck that I wanted was cleaned, and the voyage was brief and

not unpleasant.

The soil about Jaffa is perfectly dry and wonderfully fertile, but only

on the strict condition of its being amply supplied with water. Its

environs were traversed by dusty roads between dull mud walls, on whose

other side the richly watered gardens lay; so pedestrians, as might be

expected, were thirsty and covetous. I saw a sort of pump handle with a

spout on the side of the road, and an inscription above bearing some such

encouraging text as “Drink! Here is water.” Accordingly we pumped, and a

little water did certainly come; but however hard we pumped there issued

no more than a scanty streamlet out of the spout. We heard, all the same,

a sound of abundance of water that never reached us, the cause of which

was soon discovered to be an ingeniously arranged division, by means of

which the pumper got only a small fraction of the water he raised, and

the garden got all the rest. It was an excellent example of the higher

forms of commercial enterprise. They enrich all round, but the merchant

to whose initiative they are due gets by far the biggest share.

I was too unwell for a long day’s ride on horseback, and hired a camel,

which was not a usual conveyance, to take me from Jaffa to Jerusalem.

The exaltation I felt at the first sight of the walls was far too high

to last long. It was broken in the night by the miaulings of cats, the

flat roofs of the houses forming an almost unlimited playground for those

unscriptural and half-diabolical creatures.

In those days the course of the Jordan had been untravelled, as I was

assured, since the memory of man, and the Dead Sea had never been

navigated, with one solitary and most painful exception a year or two

previously. Captain Costigan, whose accomplished married sister, Mrs.

Bradshaw, I counted among my Leamington friends, had transported a boat

to the Dead Sea. His man, or men, played him false, emptying the water

keg in order that they might sooner get at the wine. He started with, I

think, only a single man, the wind was unfavourable to return, he had to

toil at the oar under the blazing sun, caught sunstroke and died.

The peace among the tribes who occupied the valley of the Jordan, which

had been favourable to him, still continued, and I determined on an

expedition down it, having then temporarily thrown off the ague. It

seemed possible that the Jordan might be descended on a small raft

of inflated water skins, or “kelligs,” so I procured half a dozen of

them, with the necessary lashings and other gear, and started with a

few horsemen for Tiberias. I put the raft together just below the small

bridge through which the Jordan runs out of the lake, and my escort

travelled by the side of the river to render assistance when needed, and

to form camp from time to time. It was rather a hare-brained attempt,

though amusing to plan. The river was very small and shallow, but carried

the light raft well; however, it was soon whirled under overhanging

trees, and I was nearly combed off it. Then matters grew worse, and

decidedly dangerous. The horsemen rode by the side, and were highly

amused at my difficulties. At length I became convinced that it would be

madness to persevere, so I left the raft, dressed myself, mounted my led

horse, and we rode on down the valley. It is all so perfectly known and

mapped now that it would be absurd to recount the little that I could

tell, but I became more and more impressed with the weirdness of the

great fissure in the earth’s crust through which the Jordan flows. Even

the Lake of Tiberias is 300 feet below the level of the sea, and the

Dead Sea is about 1000 feet deeper still, and its climate very sultry in

consequence.

My first camping-place was among the tents of the Emir Rourbah. It was

an important encampment of Bedouins, whose dress I had been instructed

to wear, and on no account to appear in the hated Turkish fez. When I

arrived, there were watchers on every point of vantage. I was kindly

received and shown much of their everyday life. The Emir had a quantity

of chain armour, such as was in common use among the chiefs in the

Soudan. I was surprised to find how effectual it was in spreading over a

large surface the sensation of what otherwise would have been a painfully

sharp blow. Matters progressed very pleasantly until the thoughtless

omission of a Moslem ceremony soured my welcome. It may sound trifling,

but it was effective all the same. I had shot a desert partridge, but

not killed it, so, taking it up, I knocked its head, English fashion,

against the stock of my gun. I ought to have cut its throat with my

knife, while repeating the Moslem formula. I caught sight of a look of

abhorrence on the face of my companions, and thereupon evidently ceased

to be considered as one of themselves, but as a hateful and hypocritical

Christian; so I was glad to be allowed soon to depart.

After a brief stay about Jericho, where I tasted and foolishly bathed

in the nasty, sticky, dense water of the bituminous Dead Sea, which

stuck in my hair for the day, I returned to Jerusalem with the view of

transporting a boat. But finding that I was wanted at home on some legal

business, that it was desirable to be out of the way of the claimants to

the little property of poor Ali, my late dragoman, and feeling ill and

used-up, I set sail with my two monkeys homewards.

I was put in quarantine in the Lazarette of Marseilles for, I think, ten

days. Its superior officer was a military martinet. One of my monkeys

got loose and ran all about the Lazarette, where, according to rule,

he ought to have put every article that he touched into at least the

same quarantine as himself, and there were bales of goods in store. The

officer was transported with rage, and actually ran after the nimble

monkey with drawn sword, to the intense amusement of the onlookers and

of the monkey. I quietly captured him at last. The officer vented his

feelings in appropriate language, but as he could do no more, the breach

of quarantine regulations was overlooked, and so the matter ended.

When I reached London, on a chilly November day, I failed to find a

comfortable night’s lodging for my pets, but an old friend who was living

in apartments kindly undertook their charge. He handed them with many

instructions to his landlady, who thought and perhaps said, “Drat the

beasts!” and shut them up in the cold scullery, where they were found the

next morning dead in one another’s arms.

CHAPTER VIII

HUNTING AND SHOOTING

Leamington—Moors—Orkney and Shetland—Balloon—_Telotype_

I returned to my mother and sister, who then occupied Claverdon, much

in need of a little rest. I was also conscious that with all my varied

experiences I was ignorant of the very A B C of the life of an English

country gentleman, such as most of the friends of my family had been

familiar with from childhood. I was totally unused to hunting, and I had

no proper experience of shooting. This deficiency was remedied during the

next three or four years. Under the advice of my eldest brother, I bought

a hunter and a hack, and began to hunt at the rate of about three days

per fortnight in Warwickshire, at neighbouring meets.

The next year I established myself at Leamington, jobbed horses,

and hunted methodically. There was a small “Hunt Club,” supposed to

be somewhat select, to which I belonged, and where I dined when not

otherwise engaged. The hunting men most to the fore in Leamington in

those days included some who had considerable gifts, each in their

respective ways. Foremost among them was Jack Mytton, son of the more

famous Jack Mytton (1796-1834) who was notorious for his daring feats

and other extravagances, who wasted a large fortune and died unhappily.

His life has been published; a brief account of it may be read in the

_Dictionary of National Biography_. The son’s career seemed moulded on

that of his father, and he too wasted a fortune that had somehow accrued

to him, and died prematurely. There was no question as to his ability and

power over others.

A more or less unfortunate fate befell most of my other companions at the

Hunt Club. Many of the small party who habitually dined there were social

favourites, and two at least of them were of more than average social

rank. Five of these men contrived to ruin themselves by betting and

gambling, and to end unhappily. For all that, they were bright companions

in the heyday of their fortunes. They lived in good style and as a rule

not very prodigally, though all had fits of recklessness. One of the most

valuable qualities in a man of moderately independent means who has to

live in a society of this kind is a carelessness to the attraction of

gambling.

A Leamington friend, Fazakerley, asked me to the Highlands to shoot. His

moor was called Culrain; it was about fifteen miles long by three broad,

and the small house on it was three miles from Bonar Bridge. I bought a

beautiful Irish setter which a friend chose for me, and we shot in the

leisurely fashion of those days, when driving game was never practised.

I slept in a neighbouring bothy, for the house was small, and I quickly

obtained some knowledge of English sport on the moors. At the end of the

season, the weather being still fine, I made my way to John O’Groat’s

House, opposite the Orkneys, whence, after being wind-bound for a while,

I sailed in the post boat, which was then the only means of conveying

letters from island to island, and so reached the so-called “Mainland,”

and settled at Kirkwall.

The next year I started before the grouse season began, and spent a most

interesting summer among the Shetlands, using rowboats as the usual means

of conveyance, and occupying myself with seal-shooting and bird-nesting.

I could write much about all this, and on the weird experiences of a

fisher society living in a treeless land, with whale-jaws for posts,

and with no knife in their pockets larger than a penknife, having only

tobacco and string to cut with it. Their social hierarchy was such, that

a man who had been to Hudson’s Bay had taken, to speak in the language

of a University, a “Poll Degree.” Those who had visited Baffin Bay were

considered to have gained “Honours.”

A shoal of whales (the cawing whale, averaging perhaps 20 feet in length)

came ashore whilst I was in Shetland, and I hurriedly rode several miles

to be in time to see them. Nearly one hundred were lying dead on the

beach, but they looked small as they were scattered over the shore of the

bay. The excitement of driving in the shoals is said to be an event not

easily forgotten. It was all over by the time I arrived.

I would not shoot a seal now, but youths are murderous by instinct, and

so was I. There was much of interest in the conditions under which they

were shot. The early rise in the long summer day, the row to the leeward

side of a likely holm, or small island; creeping up to a good vantage

point and waiting there until the head of a seal is seen to bob up; then

stalking the animal by running from cover to cover whenever he sinks out

of sight. Then, on reaching the beach, going cautiously between the big

boulders to a good shooting-place and poking the rifle over one of the

stones, shielding it and self from sight as carefully as possible. There

one has to wait, perhaps with the tide coming in over one’s legs, until

in the course of his antics the seal’s head rises within sure shooting

distance; then a careful aim, and a bang. The boatmen hearing the sound,

come rowing as hard as they can round the corner, lest the seal should

sink and be lost. He ought to be shot dead, or not touched at all. The

oozing blubber of the animal makes a circular calm round the spot where

he is shot, with the bloodstain in the middle. A boat-hook secures the

seal even if he should have sunk four or five feet. His market value is a

few shillings; the boatmen get him as their perquisite.

I heard a story about the domesticity of the seal, as having recurred,

with variations in detail, at more than one place. A young seal was

caught and became quite at home with the fisherman, coming to his house

for company, for warmth in the winter-time, and for food. It was petted

until its size made it too big for a pet and troublesome to the children.

Then the fisherman, sad at heart, took it with him in his boat, far away

to the fishing-ground, and threw it overboard. Some days later, when the

family were at supper, rather dismal at the loss of their old friend,

they heard the familiar sound of scuffling and scratching, and on opening

the door, in flopped the seal.

I used to watch the breeding-places of the sea birds, of which there were

multitudes, of perhaps twenty different kinds. The stormy petrels make

their nests deep in beaches of shingle. An intelligent man initiated me

into the way of taking them. We crept as silently as might be to where

the twitterings could be heard, and, having carefully located the spot,

tossed away the shingle as fast as we could, and usually found the bird

on its nest. Its oily smell is very strong and rank. The popular belief

is that if you cram a wick between the beak and down the gullet of a

dried-up petrel and light it, the bird will burn like a lamp.

The hardships of what was called deep-sea fishing were great. It was

conducted in open whale-boats with six rowers, who were generally

thirty-six hours absent, and sometimes longer. In bad weather they had

to keep to their oars, and could get little or no sleep all the time.

I was told that on returning they went half stupid to bed, and, partly

awakening to feed from time to time, slept for full twenty-four hours on

end.

I could tell many tales of what I heard and saw, such as that at one

lighthouse (I think in North Ronaldshay) the keeper, wishing to alleviate

the solitude of his life, cast about for a suitable pet. That which he

selected did credit to his genius. It was a toad in a bottle, requiring

no care, little if any food, easily placed on any shelf, and always

showing its bright eye.

When I finally left Shetland, which was after the grouse season, I took

as a present to my brother for the large pool at Edstone, a crate full

of many different kinds of sea birds, which I was assured would live in

fresh water and pick up snails in the garden, as tamed gulls do. The

railway people put the crate in a very exposed truck on a chill autumn

night, which killed three-quarters of them at least. The remainder throve

at Edstone for a while, the latest survivor being an oyster-catcher, who

came to his end thus. It had been freezing hard in the night, followed by

soft snow, and then re-freezing. Next morning they found the tracks of a

fox on the snow-covered ice, going to a place where the yellow legs and

nothing else of the bird remained frozen in. The oyster-catcher’s legs

had been entrapped by the frost, and his body had been snapped up by the

fox.

During the many weeks and months that I spent in London between 1846 and

1850, which is the time to which this chapter refers, I took walks with

friends, and sometimes rides with Harry Hallam, once on a most pleasant

riding tour with him in South Wales, and I went to meets of the Queen’s

Stag Hounds.

Among many other things, I was eager to know the sensations of

ballooning; I venture to give my own impression of it. There were

occasional nightly ascents from the then existing Cremorne Gardens, and

foolishly thinking that I could sneak in under cover of darkness, I

engaged a seat. The evening arrived, and I found it was advertised as a

Gala Festival, and I was anything but secluded from observation. A number

of fireworks were attached to the car, and after an oration from the

aeronaut, up we went. It was very curious to observe the up-turned faces

of the crowd below, which seemed to recede, for I had no sensation of

being myself in movement. The fireworks went off, and doubtless made an

effective display, and then all seemed singularly still. I was surprised

at feeling no giddiness, but the car is so deep and the swelling of the

balloon so voluminous that there is always much to steady the eye. The

chief cause of giddiness when standing on a small isolated platform seems

to lie in the absence of anything for the eye to “hold on by,” meaning

by this, anything that shows a sensible change of perspective, however

slightly the body may move. Consciousness of altering one’s position is

due to two things, the change in perspective, and the sensations arising

in the well-known “semicircular canals” of the ear. When the latter

sensation is present unaccompanied by the former, mental distress results.

The balloon was open below, and owing perhaps to some optical illusion,

it seemed to be filled with a singularly pure and beautiful medium. The

quietness and sense of repose were the chief feelings that I experienced;

next the clearness with which some noises, such as the barkings of

dogs, reached us when we were still at a considerable height. Besides

myself, there were only the aeronaut and his boy; the former alternately

boisterous and maudlin. He told me that his wife frequently dreamed that

he would come to an ill end, and so he did, breaking his thigh not long

after in a balloon descent and dying from it. The “bump-bag” and the

grapnel were new to me. The bump-bag is useful in permitting a quick

descent to be made in order to catch a particular field in the line of

drift. More gas is let out than is necessary for a normal descent, then

when the car is still some feet above the ground the bump-bag rests on

it, its weight is removed, and the lightened balloon descends slowly

through those remaining few feet.

We drifted for an hour or more in the quiet dim night, learning our

course by watching what could be seen of the country below, for of course

there is nothing in the balloon itself to tell whether it is moving

backwards, forwards, or sideways. It drifts with the air, so relatively

to the air it is perfectly still. When it was time to descend, the valve

was opened and bits of torn-up paper thrown out, which dashed upwards, as

it were. In other words, we dashed downwards through them. At length we

approached what the aeronaut thought would be a suitable field to descend

upon, and let go the grapnel, which is a light but strong steel anchor

with four pointed arms. It failed to catch hold, and we went drifting

on towards a large decorous family mansion, with hothouses by the side

and a lawn in front; sheep were placidly lying in the field. The horrid

grapnel bobbed and scratched the ground among the sheep, fortunately

without hooking one, and caught in the fence round the lawn. Then the

valve was opened wide, letting out volumes of stinking gas; the rooks in

a neighbouring rookery which we had brushed on our way, were vociferous,

the dogs everywhere about barked furiously, and the natives in the

neighbouring village were awakened and ran to the scene.

In the midst of the hubbub the hall door opened wide and let out a glare

of light, in which a portly butler with two man-servants in livery

appeared to be framed, looking horrified, as well they might be, by the

sudden disorderly invasion of visitants from the sky. After some delay,

we were invited to enter, and found the unhappy owner of the mansion

in his dining-room by his uncleared late dessert, with decanters of

wine, utterly perplexed as to the character of the welcome he ought to

offer. The aeronaut gulped the wine offered to him, declaring with much

rigmarole that it was a scientific (!) ascent. I cowered, and was utterly

ashamed. After a miserable hour’s delay, and thanks chiefly to the

exertions of the boy, a postchaise was procured, the balloon was packed

into its own car together with all its gear, and the car was hoisted on

the roof of the chaise. The boy insinuated himself somewhere, and the

aeronaut and I reached London in the small hours of the morning. I was so

afraid of meeting in society the ill-used master of the mansion that I

determinedly abstained from finding out who he was. The moral that I drew

from the trip is, that the ascent and travel in calm weather in a balloon

is most delightful; the return to earth most disagreeable, and dangerous

in even a slight wind.

Among the many trifling events that occurred about that time, I may

mention a yachting fiasco. I had a fancy to see Iceland, and, having had

a little yachting experience on a brief third visit to Shetland, whither

I and a companion sailed in an old Revenue cutter, hired I forget at what

port, and being assured that with a similar vessel the trip might safely

be made, I went to Ryde to hire one. The owner of a cutter that seemed

suitable made no difficulty, so I hired it for a month. On arriving on

board, in order to test the capabilities of the vessel and its crew, I

told the captain to set sail to Hastings. He was suave, but pointed out

the impossibility with the then wind and tide of getting there. I did

not clearly understand his arguments, but answered, “Never mind; it will

suit me equally well to go in the opposite direction to Penzance.” The

captain was still suave, but even more obstructive than before; at length

it turned out that he had no idea of sailing beyond the Solent and its

neighbourhood. Being resourceful, I accordingly went to Lymington, and

used the yacht as an hotel, getting a couple of days’ hunting in the New

Forest, and compromising about the hire of the yacht.

It will be thought from what appears in this chapter that I was leading a

very idle life, but it was not so. I read a good deal all the time, and

digested what I read by much thinking about it. It has always been my

unwholesome way of work to brood much at irregular times.

The one definite scientific piece of work in these years that is worth

mentioning refers to the then newly introduced electric telegraph. I had

always a liking for electricity, and had some cells in a drawer of my

study table with wires leading from them through the woodwork, to which

apparatus could be attached. All this would be thought very elementary

now, but some new things have to be done by such means when a science

is in its infancy. I wished to print telegraphic messages and to govern

heavy machinery by an extremely feeble force.

The method adopted may be explained thus. Suppose a telegraphic needle

of the most delicate construction conceivable, having the three possible

movements of right, neutral, left, to be momentarily lifted off its

support by an arm that squeezes it against a little cushion above.

However delicate the needle may be, its projecting ends will be stiff

enough to push another freely suspended (but non-magnetic) needle of a

much stronger and heavier build, in the same direction as itself. This

process may be repeated on a third needle of considerably larger size

and greater strength; and if desired, on a fourth. The force required to

keep all this going is independent of that which moves the first needle,

and is applied by a reciprocating beam worked by ordinary power. The

synchronising of the two stations is a simple matter, no great precision

being wanted in order that the electric impulses should be delivered to

the first needle at the right times. Without going further into this

long bygone matter, I may say that I printed what I had to tell in a

pamphlet entitled the _Telotype_ (No. 1 in the text of my Memoirs in

the Appendix). The pamphlet was post-dated, after the manner of some

publishers, as being in June 1850. It was really printed in 1849; I had

left England for my travels on April 5, 1850. The pamphlet had long since

gone into the limbo of the forgotten, so it was a surprise to me, not

many years ago, to meet one of the most prominent electricians of the

day, who told me that he had seen and procured it for the library of the

Electrical Society. Moreover, he spoke appreciatively of my youthful

attempt. _Requiescat in pace._ There was more in the pamphlet than is

described above.

CHAPTER IX

SOUTH-WEST AFRICA

Royal Geographical Society—Ch. J. Andersson—Cape Town—Walfish

Bay—Reach Damara Land—Hans—Negotiations with Namaqua

chiefs—Revs. Rath and Hahn—Wagons brought up

Travellers of the present generation need some effort of imagination

to put themselves into the mental positions of those who were living

in 1849. Blank spaces in the map of the world were then both large and

numerous, and the positions of many towns, rivers, and notable districts

were untrustworthy. The whole interior of South Africa and much of that

of North Africa were quite unknown to civilised man. Similarly as regards

that of the great continent of Australia. The unknown geography of the

North Polar regions preserved some of the earlier glamour attached to the

possibility of finding a navigable North-West passage from England to

China, which inspection of the globe shows to be far shorter than that

round the Cape. The South Polar regions had only been touched here and

there. The geography of Central Asia was in great confusion, the true

position of many places familiar in ancient history being most uncertain,

while vast areas remained wholly unexplored, in the common sense of that

word. It was a time when the ideas of persons interested in geography

were in a justifiable state of ferment.

My own inclinations were to travel in South Africa, which had a potent

attraction for those who wished to combine the joy of exploration with

that of encountering big game. The book of Harris, describing the

enormous herds of diverse animals that he found on the grassy plains

of South Africa, had directed many sportsmen thither who abundantly

confirmed his account. Gordon Cumming had just returned to England.

Oswell, then in company with Livingstone, and with another companion,

Murray, had recently made a joint expedition, in which the desert country

which hitherto limited the range of travel to the northward had been

traversed, and Lake Ngami discovered. Consequently the well-watered

districts beyond this desert could now be reached by wagon from the

Cape. I felt keenly desirous of taking advantage of this new opening,

and inquired much of those who had recently returned from South Africa

concerning the conditions and requirements of travel there. But I wanted

to have some worthy object as a goal and to do more than amuse myself.

It happened at this critical moment of my life that I was walking with

my cousin, Captain Douglas Galton, R.E., then one of the most rising

officers of the Engineers, and subsequently Sir Douglas Galton, K.C.B.,

of whom I have already spoken. He suggested my putting myself in

communication with the Royal Geographical Society, where I could learn

precisely whereabouts exploration was especially desirable, and where I

should be sure to receive influential support. He offered introductions

to some of its leading members, which I gladly accepted, and this

determined my line of life for many years to come.

The immediate helpfulness to a traveller of such a Society is very great.

It has the further advantage of pledging him to undertake work that is

authoritatively judged to be valuable. My vague plans were now carefully

discussed, made more definite, and approved, and I obtained introductions

to many persons useful to me in their respective ways. I was introduced

to the then Colonial Secretary, Lord Grey, who gave instructions in my

favour to the Governor of the Cape.

My outfit was procured, and other preparations were far advanced, when

my kind friend, Sir Hyde Parker, whose acquaintance I first made when

shooting at Culrain, strongly urged me to engage a companion. He told me

that a young Swede whose history he knew intimately was then in England,

and that I could not do better than come to terms with him. This was

Charles J. Andersson, who became my travelling-friend and second in

command. He spoke English fluently, through having been brought up by

Charles Lloyd, a well-known Scandinavian sportsman and writer, but an

Englishman of Quaker extraction. I may mention here that I made Mr.

Lloyd’s acquaintance some years later, when his face had been frightfully

scarred with wounds made by a bear. He told me that an old wounded

she-bear had turned upon him, and actually got his head between her jaws

to crack it, but her rounded teeth failed to find at once a sufficiently

sharp hold and only tore the flesh. His companion shot the animal in time.

Andersson was accustomed to the rough life of a sportsman, and had been

sent to England to push his way to fortune as he best could. His capital

wherewith to begin consisted of a crate of live capercailzie, two bear

cubs, and the skin of one of their parents. He was then so naïve that,

seeing an auctioneer’s placard about a forthcoming sale of farm stock, in

which was included “20,000 Swedes,” he, not knowing that in the language

of farmers “Swedes” meant “turnips,” confessed afterwards to a thrill of

terror lest they should be his compatriots, and lest he himself might be

pounced upon and sold as a slave together with them.

I was most fortunate in securing Andersson, because a second in command

proved at times to be a necessity, and he always did his part admirably.

He was remarkably strong and agile. When on board our full-rigged

sailing-ship he began for amusement to climb the rigging. A sailor

followed him, as is the wont of sailors, with a piece of twine to lash

his feet as soon as he had gone as high as he dared, and to keep him

bound there until he had consented to “pay his footing.” Andersson

perceived the game, and completely vanquished the sailor by descending

from the maintop to the deck, hand over hand down the mainstay, which

was too daring a feat for the sailor to emulate. Consequently Andersson

became highly respected by all the crew.

One of the effects of association with the leading members of the Royal

Geographical Society was to show me that the world of English interests

was very much wider and more earnest than that of the coteries among

which I had chiefly lived, and that many men were thoroughly able to

understand and criticise my proposed course justly, whose good opinion

if I succeeded would be of far more value to me than the approbation of

a multitude of less well-informed persons, however numerous or laudatory

they might be.

I left England on April 5, 1850. My voyage deserves a few words of

description, because it was made under conditions that are now obsolete,

which had some advantages to counterbalance their many disadvantages.

The ship was called the _Dalhousie_, an old teak-built East Indiaman,

quite incapable of beating against a head wind, and occupying nearly

eighty days in reaching Cape Town. It was chiefly used on this journey

to carry emigrants at cheap rates with rough accommodation, but a few

cabin passengers were taken besides, who had the use of the high poop

to themselves. In a long voyage like that of ours, the elements count

for much, and the manipulation of the ship is of continual interest.

The charm of the Northern Trades, of the calms and sudden squalls of

the Equatorial Belt, and of the crisp, strong Southern Trades cannot

possibly be experienced in an equal degree by those on board a fast

steamer, that rushes through all of them at an equal speed and holds its

course almost regardless of wind and weather. I was glad, too, of the

abundant opportunities of familiarising myself with the sextant, by which

I mean a much closer acquaintance with its manipulation and adjustments

than nautical persons are usually contented with or require. I had left

England without any practical instruction either in obtaining latitudes

and longitudes, or in surveying, for I failed to find anybody who would

give it, consistently with the limited time then at my disposal. The

excellent facilities now afforded by the Royal Geographical Society for

the instruction of intending travellers did not then exist; indeed, I

had a large part in their introduction many years later. I was, however,

familiar with the requisite book-work, and relied on what I could pick

up on board ship and elsewhere to supplement it. Let me anticipate that

I took very kindly indeed to instrumental work, and learnt in time to

get more out of my sextants, etc., than most persons. Land work admits

of far greater exactitude with that instrument than sea work, where the

true position of the horizon is never known, owing to uncertainties

of refraction, and is not seen at all at night. The sun, which is the

principal object of observation at sea, is little used on land, where

the altitudes of stars are obtainable with great accuracy from their

reflections in a small trough of mercury. Also the hand can be so rested

that the images of the star and of its reflection shall be quite steady

when seen through the telescope. Moreover, the two images, whether of

the star and its reflection, or of the star and the moon, can be toned

to an exactly equal degree of brightness. The sextant is a very powerful

instrument for its size, in the hands of those who have patience and

skill to get the most out of it.

I was received very kindly at the Cape by the Governor, Sir Harry Smith,

and by his lady, whose name is perpetuated in that of the well-known town

“Ladysmith,” called after her. But the news from the frontier recently

received at Cape Town scattered my plans like a bombshell. The Boers,

who had been very unruly, had affirmed their intention of keeping the

newly discovered lands about Lake Ngami to themselves and of refusing

passage through their territory to every Englishman. Sir Harry Smith said

it would be useless for me to attempt to go as I had proposed. After a

tedious journey of more than two months by ox wagon, I should meet with

Boers who would politely but firmly tell me that I must go no farther.

If I attempted to force a way, they would shoot me, and he would be

powerless to prevent them.

I had made many friends in Cape Town, and numerous suggestions were

offered as to other ways of reaching the district of Lake Ngami. The

one I adopted had many arguments in its favour. A cattle-dealer then in

Cape Town had made occasional ventures to Walfish Bay. The coast around

it was desert, but the Namaqua Hottentots drove cattle there for sale,

which would otherwise have been sent overland to the Cape by what is

practically a four months’ journey. The country between Walfish Bay and

the Namaquas could be traversed by wagons. There were mission stations

in Namaqualand, whose headquarters were in Cape Town. Nay more, a new

missionary was waiting for an opportunity to go there, and if I took him

with the other things now waiting to be sent, I should be helpful to the

missionaries, and they would doubtless be all the more inclined to help

me. Again, to the north of the yellow Namaquas were the black Damaras,

the interior of whose land was as yet quite unknown, though two or three

mission stations had been established along its southern border.

Here, then, was a land ready to be explored, by which a new way

through grassy country might be found leading through Walfish Bay to

the interior, and at the same time south of the territory claimed and

practically barred by the Portuguese. Sir Harry Smith desired to use

every opportunity of disavowing the complicity of the Cape Government

with the attacks of the Boers on the natives, and he requested me to use

such occasions as I might have, of doing so. He caused a document to be

drawn up to express this and to serve as my credentials. It was written

in English, Dutch, and Portuguese, with a huge seal appended to it,

protected by a tin case.

The story of my journey has been so fully told[2] in print that I shall

go but little into the details of it here. Moreover, the country has of

late been so traded through and fought over, and in large part occupied

by the Germans, that it has, I presume, become mapped with considerable

exactness.

It will be seen by my sketch map that the country I travelled over proved

to be inhabited by three principal and widely different races, occupying

three roughly parallel belts of country running from west to east. The

southernmost were the Namaquas. They were yellow Hottentots, with hair

growing in tufts on their heads, and speaking a language full of clicks.

They had a strain of Dutch blood, and most of them spoke a little of the

Dutch language. Their race reaches down through more and more civilised

tribes to the Cape Colony. Captain, afterwards Sir James Alexander

(1803-1885), had travelled right through their territory from the Cape

to Walfish Bay, and back. Mission stations were planted among them, of

which the two northernmost, numbered 1 and 5 on the map, were called

Schepmansdorf and Rehoboth respectively. The Kuisip river-bed, down which

water runs only once in every few years, and ends in Walfish Bay, makes a

northern limit to the Namaquas, which they were apt to transgress.

[Illustration]

The Swakop river-bed, in which water runs every year after the rains,

and which enters the sea some forty miles north of Walfish Bay, is the

southern limit of the Damaras. Two mission stations (2 and 3), called

Otchimbingue and Barmen respectively, were established on the Swakop. A

third, marked 4 on the map, had been established, but destroyed shortly

before my arrival by a murderous raid of Namaquas, under Jonker, whose

name will be found on the map, and the position of whose home is shown

by a dot. The land between the Swakop and the Kuisip is a high desert

plateau and uninhabited. The Damaras extend northward up to about the

line where “Damara Limit” is written on the map, and they extend far to

the east. The Kaoko plain, of which I learnt little that was definite,

lies to the west, between them and the sea.

“Damara” is a corruption of the Hottentot word “Damup,” used

indiscriminately for numerous Bantu tribes that have no general name in

their language, but severally call themselves Ovaherero, Ovapantieru,

etc. In a similar way the Arabic word “Caffre” (Kaffir, or infidel)

comprehends many different Bantu tribes on the east side of South

Africa. The Damaras and the Caffres are clearly of the same race. To the

immediate north of Damara Land is a narrow belt of country ill fitted for

habitation. Northward of this belt and from the line where “Ovampo Limit”

is written on the map, is the country of the Ovampo. The Ovampo are pure

negroes, but of a high type. Their country extends northwards a little

beyond the limits of the map, up to the Cunene River, beyond which the

Portuguese claim possession.

In addition to the Damaras, small tribes are scattered over their

territory of two totally distinct races of Hottentot and Negro. Both of

these tribes now speak the Hottentot language. The first of them are the

Bushmen, so called by the Namaquas, and who are pure Hottentots. They are

usually small men, but not so very small as the Bushmen proper of Cape

Colony are, or rather were, for those exist no longer. On the other hand,

the Ghou Damup are as purely negro as the Ovampo. The Bushmen and the

Ghou Damup are equally hunted and equally ill-treated by the Damaras, and

they live wherever they can find safety. The Ghou Damup are apparently

the inferior of the two.

I suppose that the country was inhabited long ago by the progenitors of

the Ghou Damup, probably a branch of the Ovampo; that the Hottentots

invaded it, and lorded over the Ghou Damup for so many years that the

latter wholly forgot their native tongue, and spoke the Hottentot

language instead; lastly, that the Hottentots, and of course the Ghou

Damup also, were in their turn overrun by the progenitors of the Damaras,

and became dispersed among them as they are at the present time.

The Bushmen are nomadic and good hunters. The Ghou Damup are sedentary,

living on roots and the like, but they have a stronghold in Erongo, to

the north-west of the Mission Station No. 2 on the map. They live there

in marvellously rocky and easily defensible quarters, totally unsuitable

to the pastoral Damaras, who have no object to gain by attacking and

ousting them if they could. I visited also a large encampment of Bushmen

in quite another part of the country, and stayed by them for four days,

at the place marked Tbs (= Tounobis), on the extreme right hand of the

map.

* * * * *

It was reckoned to be a six or seven days’ sail from Cape Town to Walfish

Bay, so I hired a small schooner, and with the help of many kind friends

got all my equipment on board. It consisted of a light cart, two Cape

wagons, nine mules from which a team could be selected to draw the cart,

when it was laden with articles of barter to buy oxen, and two if not

three skilled drivers and other necessary men; also two horses which were

not expected to live long, and did not, and a few dogs. The gear of the

missionary and the young missionary himself were also taken on board. We

started from Cape Town in the second week of August 1850.

On arriving at Walfish Bay, we found ourselves faced by as desolate

and sandy a shore as even Africa can show, which is saying a great

deal. There was a small empty wooden hut on the beach, very useful as

a storehouse; a few natives appeared, and one consented to act as a

messenger to the mission station twenty miles off, in return for a stick

of tobacco and a biscuit. This is No. 1 on the map (Schepmansdorf). We

landed the things as best we could from the schooner, which was anchored

one-third of a mile from the shore. The animals had to swim, the rest of

the cargo was taken in many instalments by the dinghey. The missionary,

Mr. Bam, and his then guest and helper Mr. Stewardson, a former

cattle-trader, made their appearance the next night, riding on oxen,

which is a usual mode of travel in these parts.

In the meantime we had visited the watering-place “Sand Fontein,” three

miles off, of which we had heard, and which is marked by a dot on the

map. It was at that time a puddle of nasty water, but gave a sufficient

quantity of it for the mules and horses. A cask of good drinking water

was brought ashore for ourselves and placed in the storehouse.

It was agreed that all my possessions should be carried to Mr. Bam’s

station, No. 1 on the map, and it was finally arranged that Mr.

Stewardson should guide us up country to Mission Station No. 2.

My disasters began soon. The journey across the arid plain that separated

the Kuisip from the Swakop taxed the strength of the mules, who were

wholly unused to such a strain. It was necessary to give them immediate

rest and food as soon as the pasturage of the Swakop was reached. Tracks

of wild animals were looked for on the sand of the river-bed, but none

were found, so Stewardson urged that our mules and horses should be left

free during the night to rest and feed themselves. The result was that a

troop of lions dashed down upon them in the dark, killing one mule and

one of my two horses. The remainder galloped off unscathed, and were

recovered in the afternoon. The tracks of the lions by the side of those

of the animals up to the two fatal springs told the story clearly. I had

no reserve of food, so it was necessary to utilise the horse flesh, which

I cut off and stored in an apparently safe hole in the side of a cliff.

When I returned towards nightfall to remove it, one of my enemies had

out-generalled me. He had clambered from behind and unseen to a ledge

five or six yards above the hiding-place, and could be seen there by the

party below, crouched like a cat above a mouse-hole. I got down safely,

meat and all, and saw the head and the pricked ears of the brute as he

kept his position. A shot struck the rock under his chin, and he decamped.

I had little further trouble with lions during my journey, though they

were often heard roaring at night. I think I only lost one cow, and

apparently a few of my remaining mules after I had no further use for

them. All eight of the mules decamped later on, when I had provided

myself with oxen; three of them reached Schepmansdorf; those that

disappeared on the way had probably been killed by lions. The very

first animal I shot in Africa was a lion, just after my first arrival

at Schepmansdorf. It had crossed from the Swakop to the Kuisip and had

seized a small dog in the yard of the mission station, while I was asleep

in an almost doorless hut that opened on the same yard. So much for lions.

I pass over all the other difficulties, troubles, and events that

intervened, which have been related in the books above mentioned. Suffice

it to say that by the end of September I was installed at Station No. 2

under the kind care of Mr. Rath, the resident missionary. Here I had the

good fortune to meet Hans Larsen, a Dane, who spoke English perfectly. He

had been a sailor, but obtained permission to quit his ship at Walfish

Bay and to enter the service of a cattle-dealer. When that particular

venture was concluded, he joined a second cattle-dealer, and finally

found himself at large with a small herd of oxen, which he intended

to drive overland and to sell at Cape Town. I had been most strongly

urged to acquire his services if I could, and I did so to my very great

advantage, partly, I may add, through my medical experience. He was

willing from the first to go, were it not for a most painful whitlow

which disabled his arm, and gave him so much pain that he could hardly

sleep or eat; and he was totally unfit for the expected severe manual

work. He therefore had to make his acceptance dependent on getting well.

Now the sore was of a chronic kind, very familiar to me when at the

Birmingham Hospital. There was an outgrowth of what patients like to call

“proud flesh,” upon which a slight cautery often acts like a charm. It

stimulates the vitality of the part and causes it to act normally. It did

so in this case. I rubbed the sore lightly over with nitrate of silver,

which hurt at the time, but eventually gave him the first good night’s

rest he had enjoyed for months. Thenceforward his finger rapidly improved

and healed, and he felt and looked himself again.

I bought all his live stock of fifty oxen and one hundred sheep and

goats at a single swoop, by a cheque on Cape Town for £71. Hans himself

became a most valuable and efficient servant and friend. In brief, he and

Andersson went down to the coast with the new oxen, to break them in and

to bring up the wagons, while I remained partly at the Mission Station

No. 2, and afterwards at No. 3, where Mr. Hugo Hahn, a very accomplished

man, who had married an English wife, was the resident missionary.

Mr. Hahn possessed all the extant knowledge about the Damaras, and was

greatly interested in my proposed expedition. Information about the

wretched state of the country was gradually obtained. It came to this,

that the four tribes of Namaquas under Jonker, Cornelius, Amiral, and

Swartboy respectively, well provided with horses and guns, had made many

successive raids upon the Damaras, lifting cattle and selling them. They

usually sent the stolen animals overland to the Cape. Sometimes when

opportunity occurred they sold them to traders at Walfish Bay. The

Damaras were not only perpetually fighting among themselves, but also

provoking retaliation from the Namaquas, which the latter only too gladly

indulged in. Lastly, the Namaquas, who in the first instance welcomed

missionaries, were now opposed to them and to every outside influence or

criticism, and determined to do just what they liked both to one another

and to the Damaras. More especially they had recently determined that

no white man should pass through their country to the interior. They

were, in short, behaving in a similar, but still more marked spirit of

exclusion to that of the Boers.

The attack under Jonker on the Mission Station No. 3 on the map was

their latest iniquity. They behaved like demons. Among other things they

cut off the feet of the women to get their ankle rings, as related in

Chapter III. Unless these misdoings could be stopped, my journey would

soon come to an end. The Damaras believed that I and my party were

merely Hottentots in disguise, and acting as spies. To make a long story

short, I took Hans and two intelligent men and rode on ox-back to Jonker

himself, and rated him soundly, in English first, to relieve my mind, and

then in Dutch through my interpreters, brandishing my paper with the big

seal, and thoroughly frightened him. Arrangements, which I cannot go into

now, were made for a meeting between myself and the other Namaqua chiefs,

and ultimately a _modus vivendi_ was secured, which lasted all the time I

was in the country and for a while afterwards.

These negotiations occupied fully three months, during which every nerve

was strained to get the expedition into readiness to start. Andersson,

Hans, and nearly all the men had gone down with the cart and newly-bought

oxen to Station No. 1, whence they brought back the two wagons most

successfully, though having first to break in the oxen. Then, whilst

Andersson was encamped at Station No. 2, I rode with Hans to the mountain

stronghold of the Ghou Damup, Erongo. Finally, in March, I made my start

northwards from the place where Station No. 3 formerly stood, every step

being henceforth through new country.