earning not more but less wages even than he once used to do. He had
brought up a large family honestly and respectably; he had paid his way
without running into debt; his children were all growing up; and he had
acquired a wide reputation among naturalists as a thoroughly
trustworthy observer and an original worker in many different fields of
botany and zoology. But his wages were now only eight shillings a week,
and his science had brought him, as many people would say, only the
barren honour of being an associate of the Linnean Society, or the
respected friend of many among the noblest and greatest men of his
country. He began life as a shoemaker, and he remained a shoemaker to
the end. "Had I pursued money," he said, "with half the ardour and
perseverance that I have pursued nature, I have no hesitation in saying
that by this time I should have been a rich man."
In 1876, Dr. Smiles, the historian of so many truly great working men,
attracted by Edward's remarkable and self-sacrificing life, determined
to write the good shoemaker's biography while he was still alive.
Edward himself gave Dr. Smiles full particulars as to his early days
and his later struggles; and that information the genial biographer
wove into a delightful book, from which all the facts here related have
been borrowed. The "Life of a Scotch Naturalist" attracted an immense
deal of attention when it was first published, and led many people,
scientific or otherwise, to feel a deep interest in the man who had
thus made himself poor for the love of nature. The result was such a
spontaneous expression of generous feeling towards Edward that he was
enabled to pass the evening of his days not only in honour, but also in
substantial ease and comfort.
And shall we call such a life as this a failure? Shall we speak of it
carelessly as unsuccessful? Surely not. Edward had lived his life
happily, usefully, and nobly; he had attained the end he set before
himself; he had conquered all his difficulties by his indomitable
resolution; and he lived to see his just reward in the respect and
admiration of all those whose good opinion was worth the having. If he
had toiled and moiled all the best days of his life, at some work,
perhaps, which did not even benefit in any way his fellow-men; if he
had given up all his time to enriching himself anyhow, by fair means or
foul; if he had gathered up a great business by crushing out
competition and absorbing to himself the honest livelihood of a dozen
other men; if he had speculated in stocks and shares, and piled up at
last a vast fortune by doubtful transactions, all the world would have
said, in its unthinking fashion, that Mr. Edward was a wonderfully
successful man. But success in life does not consist in that only, if
in that at all. Edward lived for an aim, and that aim he amply
attained. He never neglected his home duties or his regular work; but
in his stray moments he found time to amass an amount of knowledge
which rendered him the intellectual equal of men whose opportunities
and education had been far more fortunate than his own. The pleasure he
found in his work was the real reward that science gave him. All his
life long he had that pleasure: he saw the fields grow green in spring,
the birds build nests in early summer, the insects flit before his eyes
on autumn evenings, the stoat and hare put on their snow-white coat to
his delight in winter weather. And shall we say that the riches he thus
beheld spread ever before him were any less real or less satisfying to
a soul like his than the mere worldly wealth that other men labour and
strive for? Oh no. Thomas Edward was one of those who work for higher
and better ends than outward show, and verily he had his reward. The
monument raised up to that simple and earnest working shoemaker in the
"Life of a Scotch Naturalist" is one of which any scientific worker in
the whole world might well be proud. In his old age, he had the meed of
public encouragement and public recognition, the one thing that the
world at large can add to a scientific worker's happiness; and his name
will be long remembered hereafter, when those of more pretentious but
less useful labourers are altogether forgotten. How many men whom the
world calls successful might gladly have changed places with that "fool
to nature," the Banffshire shoemaker!
End of Project Gutenberg's Biographies of Working Men, by Grant Allen