Scientific Papers and Addresses by George Rolleston ... arranged and edited by William Turner ... with a biographical sketch by Edward B. Tylor, Keeper of the Museum, Oxford ... vols I and II Oxford: Clarendon Press 1884

Volume 1

Life of Dr Rolleston

[p. ix] Materials for a full memoir of Professor Rolleston do not exist. But his letters, and the recollections of friends, have preserved some details of the life of a man whose power of mind and nobility of character made him a figure of moment in Oxford during the years 1860-1880, a period full of importance in the history of the University. ... [describes Frances Rolleston, one of George’s aunts]

[p. x] ... In one of Miss Rolleston’s letters (1837) she records that at Maltby she taught Hebrew to one of her nephews, ‘the very cleverest boy I ever knew.’ This was George Rolleston, then eight years old, but who in after life did not quite reciprocate his aunt’s admiration. Indeed, he used to descant with humorous horror on his sufferings when once introduced to a large and serious evening party as the nephew of the great Miss Rolleston, the authoress of ‘Mazzaroth.’

The Maltby just mentioned is a village near Rotherham in Yorkshire, where the Rev. George Rolleston combined the functions of squire and vicar, living in Maltby Hall; and his son George was born July 30, 1829. The sisters of the younger George Rolleston, the subject of this memoir, still tell of their wonder at the ways of the odd clever boy, rolling lazily on the hearth-rug, or with his heads between his hands buried in a story-book, yet all the time knowing whatever was read or said, and ready with the lessons he seemed scarcely to have looked at. Taught by his father, a fine classical scholar, the lad is said to have been able at ten years old to read Homer at sight. Some of these family stories have an interest as explaining Rolleston’s later life. It has been thought extraordinary that a man whose school and college education was entirely classical, should have turned into so thorough an anatomist and zoologist. But in fact this was a reversion to the tastes of boyhood, when at six years old, dressed in his little crimson pelisse, [1] he would go out in the snow alone to attend to his duties as ‘keeper,’ and set the traps in the plantations round the house. Brought up on Izaak Walton, White’s ‘Natural History of Selbourne,’ and Stanley’s ‘History of Birds,’ he knew all the birds and their nests, and could tell them by their flight at great distances. In his schoolboy days he had taken to preparing skins, and setting up skeletons of mice and weasels in his little room, the smell of which the inmates of the house remember after half-a-century. An old servant says of him: [p. xi] ‘He was very fond of animals and birds, and dissecting them. I once went in to call him for dinner, and the table was spread all over with birds and a foumart (polecat) he had dissected, and he showed me the different parts of the stomach. The white cat was brought up for me to see; he was waiting to dissect it, he said.’ Not less significant of his future was his setting up heaps of stones to record the death of a favourite animal or other event. A boy who at eight years old piled up in the plantation a memorial cairn to commemorate his sister’s recovery from scarlatina, was well started on the line for an explorer of ancient burial-mounds. George Rolleston had all the love of shooting and fishing of a Yorkshire moorland lad, but in later year his sensitiveness as to giving pain increased from year to year, till he came to look on field sports with horror. He used often to tell how when a boy he once went out shooting with a man-servant, and seeing something move in the hedge he fired at it, when the supposed rabbit dropped into the ditch, and the serving-man remarked it was ‘only a boy.’ Rolleston threw down his gun in despair, but the man consoled him with, ‘Never mind, Master George, there’s plenty more in Maltby.’ After all, the boy was unhurt, abut it was the sportsman’s mind that received the shock.

At ten years old he was sent to the Grammar School at Gainsborough. With pride in this advancement, when his eldest sister, who had taught him writing, now recommended his attending to it, he wrote a reply so characteristic it has been kept—‘I have no person to call “upstroke” and “downstroke.” I have now such a great deal of writing every day and night, and if it is not written well it is not signed, so that there is no need of that friendly advice.’ He stayed about two years at Gainsborough, and afterwards went to the Collegiate School at Sheffield, then under Dr. Jacob. His schoolfellows remember him getting candle ends and sitting up to read at forbidden hours, and sending fags to bring him books as he lay in bed in the early summer mornings. At seventeen he competed for an open scholarship at Pembroke College, Oxford, and [p. xii] was elected. It was in 1847 that he came into residence, and one who came up about the same time describes him as a tall thin lad, looking quite a schoolboy, with his clothes showing recent growth of limbs which had left the tailor behind. Another contemporary, who knew him well, remembers how young he was in every way, beginning at first sight to tell with schoolboy frankness all about his study at Sheffield, how he furnished it, how the boy next him had died, and how he had read all his Greek plays.

The Master of the College did not mind his youth, and only said, ‘He is a clever Yorkshireman, and when a Yorkshireman is clever, he is clever.’ Boy as he was, he took rank at once. It was the time when the College was undergoing transformation. Dr Jeune, Dean of Jersey (afterwards Bishop of Peterborough), had lately succeeded Dr. Hall as Master. [See note 22] Under him Pembroke was just on the change from a small close foundation, chiefly limited to certain schools and localities and to founders’ kin. The buildings were insufficient and some were dilapidated, and the undergraduates few, when the new Master set himself to fill the ranks of the College; funds supplied by benefactors were made effective in open scholarships and fellowships, and rebuilding and reorganisation had gone well forward before the time came when parliamentary powers were obtained to do away with the limitations of the old foundation. Thus Rolleston’s connexion with Pembroke began in years of change and activity, and threw him into the midst of a society more mixed even than usual through the overlapping of the old and new régimes. Though never hiding his own strong likes and dislikes, he already had the faculty of getting on with men of different kinds, the boating men, the fast men, the quiet reading men, and the dilettanti, who would nowadays be called aesthetes. Yet his character was already so fixed, that the influences which might have moved a more moveable disposition left him substantially what home teaching had made him years before. In the common dissipations of undergraduate life he took no part; in fact, he worked too hard. When he lived out of [p. xiii] college, his incessant reading through the night, or in summer in the window-seat in the full glare of sunshine, was a wonder to the people at his lodgings; they once ran up to tell him of a great fire, but he only said, ‘How peculiar!’ and would no more look up from his work than if he had been Archimedes. To be late for a lecture was a sin he could never forgive himself for. Once he was at breakfast in college, when ten o’clock struck; he rushed headlong downstairs, struggling into his gown as he went, meeting half-way the upcoming scout, who was knocked to the bottom of the flight, and to this day carries in a broken nose the record of punctuality. When Rolleston came to be himself a lecturer, he was in like manner severe on his class, though in later years he relaxed a little. He used to say, ‘When I was young I could never forgive my men for being late—but now I give ‘em five minutes.’ It must not be thought, however, that this studious life was due to want of ability in manly exercises. At school the old drill-sergeant would not condescend to fence with any other boy but Rolleston, who, he used to say, was the only one who could handle a single-stick if the Mounseers came among us. He rowed in his College eight, and kept up through life his fondness for the river, priding himself on his pupils who distinguished themselves there—indeed his class sometimes fancied that he tolerated their shortcomings more easily than those of other men.

An influence one would have expected to find marks of in Rolleston’s character was the religious controversy which then divided Oxford. Newman and Pusey had raised the standard of church supremacy, and a phalanx of zealous youths followed their lead. Since then Stanley, preaching for liberty, had raised a new spirit among many of the bolder and more independent. Thus within the lines of the Church of England there was renewed the world-old strife between authority and reason, with its usual distracting results of personal animosity and social division. Rolleston’s temper and work both kept him outside the actual battle of theology. The ceremonies, the symbolisms, the ecstasies of the High Church School wanted the reality he cared for. The [p. xiv] Broad Church School, more sympathetic to him, relieved him in his scientific work from the pressure of theological restraint, while enlarging his tolerance of other men’s views to the widest stretch. But from first to last he held for himself, beneath and almost untouched by theological or scientific discussion, the faith of his early youth, much as he had it from his father, the Yorkshire clergyman. It is well to get a clear idea of this from the beginning in following Rolleston’s career, which cannot be understood without it. But it must also be understood that to him the good of theology consisted in its being the vehicle of morality. It was one thing to hear him argue with his friend Wickham Flower about Augustine’s doctrine of the Fall of Man, but quite another thing if all at once he came on some live question of duty or honour, drawing from him solemn words in tones which showed where the inmost motives of his mind were enshrined. The memory of his early friends shows that in his college days it was already with him as in later years, when he had passed from taught to teacher. He had his great Homeric laugh at a sentimentalist and his all but ferocious scorn of a charlatan. But let him have a right to enforce against selfish resistance, or a wrong to expose and punish, let him feel called on to attack the oppressor of the weak, or the perverter of righteous dealing, then one might see his eyes kindle and his massive features harden into the attitude of combat, bringing even his shoulders and arms into the first suggestion of battle, truly signalling the mind within. In such real issues, rather than in abstract questions of doctrine, the man and his impulses are to be read. He was a born fighter, ever ready to do battle for truth and right, wherever he believed truth and right were to be found, and needed help from him.

Among the records of Rolleston’s Undergraduate days are letters written to his friend Miss Mary Beever, [1] a lady whom he used to visit in her house on the side of Coniston, and who in an auntly manner encouraged him to correspond with her in the old-fashioned serious way. Letters written in men’s student days ought to be thus kept, showing as they do the growth and [p. xv] shifting of crude opinions formed as each new aspect of life opens to the mind, to be strengthened or displaced as the ultimate resultant shapes itself. To the writer of these pages, who knew Rolleston well, but not till middle age, when his character had long since set into the sharp lines of liberal and reformer, it is curious to come upon him reading Macaulay’s Essays for the first time, and remarking, ‘He is rather radicalised, and is full of Progress and Whiggery, but in other respects is most delightful.’ And again, ‘What a charming history Alison’s is. I almost wonder at people’s taste for novels.’ ‘I cannot see how the most fervent admirer of Carlyle could ever be so far carried away as to enter him into competition in a historical contest with Alison.’ In his second year he described a characteristic University scene:--‘Last Sunday I heard in the beautiful Norman ante-chapel of Christ Church the man whose name Evangelical ribaldry has so long applied to all not of their own persuasion, which meaneth that Dr. Pusey preached. [2] There was an immense crush, perilous indeed to the bones of all therein engaged, caused by those who were eager to hear him. The whole Cathedral, i.e. all used for the University, was filled in the space of three minute completely as regards seats. Such is the regard the University of Oxford pays to a man humble in guise, holy in demeanour, self-denying in life, whom, however, the irreverent Dissenter and robed Schismatic scruple not to call a Jesuit, a Papist, a hypocrite. The pith of his sermon was intended to show the truth of the fact that evil shall hunt the wicked man, and that sin always in this life even superinduces an adequate punishment. And yet, which you, I am afraid, will hardly believe, there was no reference, as the “Record” would say, to inanimate mediation, such as that of Crucifixes, etc. However, I am afraid that though there was no impression of the cloven foot in the sermon, yet Puseyites would not be so called if their Founder were not like them.’ By 1850 his ideas had swung into a direction nearer that of his after-life:--‘Though I take now, for the present, little interest in anything not immediately connected with my reading, I yet every now and then catch [p. xvi] distant sounds of latrations from without. There has, I see, been a meeting in London of High Churchmen, who have been very vigorous and amusing. The triumph of Low Church, the religion of a northern democracy, is only one step forward in the race of Liberty which this century has witnessed. If bigotry had carried the day it would have been a violation of the spirit of the age, and its triumph would not have been permanent. And the defeated party, not seeing this, not knowing when they are well off, nor understanding in what utter ruin they and the whole Church would have been swallowed up if the result had been otherwise, are enduring indignation and unknown pangs. The man who has see the movements, an ear to hear the voices of the age, cannot doubt that the spirit it breathes is Individual Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and National Progress. And then, seemingly as much out of place as a figure in chain armour in a modern banqueting-room, do we see the reactionaries struggling against the stream which flows past, uninjuring while unprovoked. The apex of the Delta should meet the stream, not any one of its three longitudinal boundaries. If so, by constant alluvial deposit it becomes assimilated: if not, it is overwhelmed by the outspreading of the waters. This latter course seems to have been chosen by the present champions of Despotism. But who is so free from prejudice as to be able to read aright the spirit of the age he lives in? We have not yet left off quarrelling about the characters of Pericles and Cimon, men who lived 2000 years ago, and are out of the sphere of party passion and interest. There is no hope of wide views for present times. “If we had lived in the days of our fathers,” said the Jews of old, and we say now with equal truth. The Tory party now (for a High Churchman on any other principles but Tory is a Centaur) is not content with building the sepulchres, it would raise the ghost of the monsters who received a deadly hurt now 200 years ago at the hands of their ancestors. My most favourite subject of contemplation at present is the fight made for the principles of Liberty at the beginning of this century. Dark clouds seem [p. xvii] to rest over it, and in the midst of it are to be seen moving great figures. At present we are so close to them that they only impress us with our own littleness, not with their greatness. We are like the travellers at the foot of the Sphinx: its real size, its true proportions, are only seen at a distance. Though distance takes away from the distinctness, it adds to the majesty of its features. Now look at Arnold. In a profession in which liberal opinions were a sure bar to preferment, he stood forth as an uncompromising advocate for freedom. His views were distorted neither by prejudice nor by precedents, by establishments, nor by interest. As dispassionately as the mathematician he proposed his problem, and as calmly he declared the result, careless of everything but truth. “By the one party accused as mystic, by the other as infidel.” The man rises before us like a granite mountain, and the crows and choughs around its base show scarce so gross as beetles. The mean man could not explain, the weak man could not comprehend, his conduct. To me there is no subject so pleasing and none so ennobling as the triumph of will over interest, and the victory of conscience over expediency. But I shall tire you with my opinions...’

In 1850 Rolleston took a First Class in Classics, and next year was elected a Fellow of Pembroke. The fellowship which he took was the medical one lately founded by Mrs. Sheppard, and this circumstance was the turning-point of his life, determining him to take to Medicine as his profession. It is a good index of the change of educational ideas within the last generation, that one meets with no letters to or from Rolleston at this time complaining of his having spent four of the most receptive years of his life exclusively on classical studies, hardly in the remotest degree bearing on his future profession. Under the present system a student looking forward to the career of Medicine does not abandon altogether the literary culture which is the University’s heritage, but he soon ceases to devote his whole time to letters, and passes on into the special lines of science suited to form the ground-work for this future profession. Only men of exceptional energy and capacity [p. xviii] could afford to start so heavily handicapped as Rolleston and it is no wonder that he laboured in after years to widen the academical course into a system more perfectly adapted to meet the needs of the age. As for himself, he overcame by sheer thoroughness the difficulties of beginning to learn physic at two-and-twenty, entering as a student at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in October, 1851. A remark by his friend Professor Turner, the present editor of his scientific papers, shows how new a turn his mind had to take. Mentioning the high value Rolleston attached to his training in the Chemical Laboratory under Dr. Stenhouse, Professor Turner, who was his fellow-student there, adds, ‘It was there probably that he grasped the meaning of scientific method, and was brought face to face, for the first time, with an experimental science.’

The Master of his College gave him a piece of parting advice, that one who was to prescribe ought to begin by making up prescriptions at an apothecary’s and becoming a practical judge of drugs. That he did go to work in this way is still remembered at the Hospital, for Sir James Paget writes of him thirty years later: ‘When Mr. Rolleston came to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, his age and his standing in the University placed him among a comparatively small group of the senior students; he would not enter into any of the school competitions, but he gave himself at once to the regular work of the Hospital, and to its most practical studies. He intended to practise, and he learnt everything, even of the simplest kind, that might be useful. One might have thought that he intended to make himself a merely practical man. Yet he never gave up the pursuits of science and of literatures, and could be provoked into declaring a resolve that he would be a Fellow of the Royal Society in ten years, and he was so.’ University men were few at Bartholomew’s and kept somewhat aloof from the rest. Rolleston lodged for part of his time with another Oxford graduate, now a physician in Oxford, Dr. E.B. Gray. Their rooms were in Dyer’s Buildings, Thavies Inn, on the left hand as one goes up Holborn, where they led a diligent but uneventful life. It was Rolleston’s habit after his [p. xix] day’s work in the wards, to turn a few yards out of his way on to Blackfriars Bridge, where, standing in one of the recesses, he would face the wind for half-an-hour and then go home to dinner. The robust appetite that had been fathering since breakfast had then to be satisfied, the ‘Times’ to be read, then an hour’s heavy sleep, followed by a huge basin of strong tea to wake him well up for bookwork till 12 or 1. Such a diet, unlightened by the ordinary idleness and pleasures of the medical student, probably accounts for a good deal of the disordered constitution of later years. Sometimes he visited his friends; for instance, there is a mention in the ‘Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson’ [3] that in 1852 Rolleston came to breakfast with him to meet ‘Nineveh’ Layard. [4] But amusement seemed hardly even to occur to him. The only change in the week’s hard round was on Sunday, when at this particular time he gave his thoughts a new turn by reading through Gibbon, storing his memory with sonorous passages which he could recite verbatim to the end of his life. In the afternoon the two friends would often go down the river and walk in Greenwich Park. Anything less like the received idea of the medical student away from the wards and dissecting-room, it is not easy to imagine. Rolleston’s was a grimly serious career, and he left the Hospital with the reputation of one of its hardest workers. Never trying for prizes or distinctions, nor attempting any original research, he simply worked for knowledge and experience of medicine. The practical knowledge he had gained under Sir George Burrows, [5] whose clinical clerk he was for some time, stood him in good stead when almost immediately his opportunity came of carrying it into practice. In 1855, towards the end of the Crimean War, he was appointed one of the physicians to the British Civil Hospital at Smyrna. The Master of Pembroke wrote him a letter of good advice, very characteristic of the writer. ‘You have profit and employment in what would otherwise be the dead time in your career, possibly an avenue to something great and permanent ... You will now be under official trammels. Pray be discreet as to your words. Speak [p. xx] not too strongly of things, nor strongly at all, especially in the way of blame, of men. When you are called upon officially to express opinions, then praise or blame with justice and moderation, till then only look, think, and obey cheerfully.’

The position which Rolleston had taken was one peculiar enough to justify the counsels of Dr. Jeune. The Smyrna Civil Hospital, established at a time when the lessons of disaster were bringing about an improved military administration, is thus described in Kinglake [6] (‘Invasion of the Crimea,’ vol. vi. p. 416): ‘Amongst our Levantine hospitals, the one formed at Smyrna exhibited the success of a great innovation on which Mr Sidney Herbert [7] had ventured; for the medical officers to whom he entrusted the wards were, all of them, civilians, and these, aided by a well-chosen band of ladies and salaried nurses, made the new institution a model of what can be done for the care of troops sick or wounded.’ Such an innovation naturally had its official difficulties. General Sir H. Lefroy, [8] who made two visits to Smyrna in November, 1855, gives some account of Rolleston’s position. Colonel (afterwards Sir Henry) Storks [9] was then Commandant, and Dr. Meyer Medical Chief of the British Chief Hospital. [10] On the Medical Staff there were four senior physicians, each in charge of a division. Dr. Meyer found these gentlemen of little use, too old to alter their habits. Many of the young assistants were first-rate men, and conspicuous among them was Mr. Rolleston. The Seniors made endeavour to treat the Juniors as subordinates in a professional sense, to work as clinical clerks under them. This the young men would not submit to, and the good sense and firmness of Dr. Meyer put a veto upon it. He gave them the undivided care of cases, and looked to the Seniors for general assistance only. He found the junior surgeons, he told me, pretty good physicians, and the junior physicians pretty fair surgeons. The division into physicians and surgeons, but with no very rigid demarcation, was found to work well.

Some of Rolleston’s home letters have been kept, which show what his hospital life was to himself, and the recollections of one of the lady nurses, slight as they are, may give an idea of what he seemed to others. ‘During the nine months that I spent in the Hospital at Smyrna, I nurses almost exclusively under him in the Division confided to Dr. Leared’s [11] and his care so that I had constant opportunities for understanding his fine character, so full of talent and energy, so kind, and with so much earnestness beneath his playful manner. Looking back I see a tall slight fair young man moving up and down the long corridors lined with the beds of the sick, and the wards opening from them, giving his orders clearly, attending to every case most carefully, always kind and cheering in his manner, and most pleasant and considerate to those working under him ... He was very successful in “fighting the fever,” as he used to call it, and for a long time his Division was mostly filled with such cases.’

On May 25, 1855, the young physician writes to his sister:-- ‘Everything just now wears the couleur de rose. The last few days of April we got our hospital nearly empty; and the first six days of May brought us down two shiploads of sick from Balaclava. The first ship, the “Sydney,” steamed in on the 1st of May about 10 A.M., ran out her anchor and ran up a yellow flag about 300 yards out away from the Hospital. It was very exciting. We found however that the cases she brought down were not so serious as had been expected; and the second ship, the “Brandon,” which came on the 6th, had still fewer cases on board. Matters, in fact, are improving in the Crimea, and we have not now the wretched depression and utter prostration to deal with of which we had so much in March last. It is a short three weeks since these arrivals took place, and the Hospital is rapidly assuming the appearance of a convalescent establishment again. Can anything speak more strongly for our organisation and sanitary condition? The English have put unbounded means at the disposal of the authorities everywhere throughout the Levant; we, here at Smyrna, have made use of them, and the results will justify the expenditure. Elsewhere, I believe, the good things sent out [p. xxii] have never reached their destination, and that makes all the difference. For my own part, I have not often had such a continuance of good health and vigour. For the last six weeks I have had Dr. Martin’s wards as well as my own to take care of, and I never found myself the least overworked even at the time the two sick ships came down. It was of course a great advantage to get so much practice put into my hands all at once, and, by a little management, I contrived to get a very large share of what are called “good” cases (i.e. dangerous ones) into my own wards. At the present moment I have as many of these cases, more, I think, than anyone else. Of the first lot (16 or so), one died in about 36 hours after landing: the rest are all doing fairly. Very few deaths have taken place lately, I don’t think more than one this week. We have in reality about 750 soldiers here, though the papers speak of us as having only 500, our hospital has only 500 men in it, but it has a Convalescent establishment as well, which no other hospital has, so that they keep and count their convalescents whereas we send them off one mile to the Lazaretto and do not count them in our sum total. Hence our mortality is really very low. ... I have plenty of time for visiting and flirting, and reading to boot. In fact I have read more medical books since I have been here than I could have done anywhere else I think, also I have contrived to find an outlet for some of those social qualities which go towards making up the entire man.’ After a while, finding himself with nothing to do, Rolleston came to Sebastopol to offer his services, but Dr. Hall told him he had more doctors already than he knew what to do with, so ‘I resigned myself to sight-seeing for my fortnight’s leave of absence. In the three days I have had here, I have seen Balaclava, Inkerman and Sebastopol. I have got clear notions of what war really is, which you cannot do from books or prints (though the Redan and Malakoff [12] are very like their pictures in last week’s “Illustrated”), and I have gone over those famous fields and collected trophies with my own hands from them. Also I have heard the whistling of the round shot which the Russians fling [p. xxiii] at one from the north side. Sebastopol in the distance looks very beautiful, it has a grand Grecian building in it, like the Madeleine in Paris, which strikes the eye, as well as large barracks, hospitals, forts, etc. The south side is built on ground sloping up inclined-plane fashion from the harbour up to the south sea-board which is cliff like the south coast England, north coast France cliffs. When you enter it you are struck by the utter destruction of what seemed so fine, shots lodging in walls or great holes knocked through them, no floors, no roofs, and finally a horrid smell telling of those brave men who slumber there below. The town has not walls, and is not fenced up to heaven, but has round knolls, mamelons, lying off at a little distance, made up into earth-works, great banks of earth with embrasures for myriads of cannon. The Russians were brave men to cross the valley of Inkerman, a great deep valley with a mile of level ground between on our side of it. Down the same hillside did they descend to the bridge of Praktin, from the same hillside did they yesterday fling their shot over Philip Rolleston’s and my head as we rode over the hillside collecting relics. Oh! how thick the bullets lay in particular spots. I saw some oak-leaves gathered on that ground: you know it was all covered with brushwood where the battle was fought; all has been grubbed since and burnt. All the battles which have been fought would, if their result had been different, have decided the fate of our army. The battle of the Tchernaya was meant to cut us from Balaclava, and how the shipping would have blazed in that narrow winding valley, so at Balaclava and at Inkerman. Near indeed was the whole army to utter destruction.’ In December Rolleston was back again in Smyrna, taking one day a week at the hospital, reading medicine, riding across a country well provided with ditches and stone walls to the vineyards, attending a single lady patient, and wishing for more work. Some work was found for him, as appears from some further note by Sir H. Lefroy: ‘There were 200 vacant beds in the hospital, and the object of my mission was to arrange, in conjunction with Col. Storks, for closing it entirely. [p. xxiv] Chiefly however in consequence of the great ability of a few of the Juniors, and I again remark that Mr. Rolleston was the representative man, we determined to retain the services of four of them, viz. Messrs. Rolleston, Wilkinson, Eddows, Atkinson, as a reserve of medical strength, and to meet contingencies. This fortunately met with Lord Panmure’s approval, [13] and it was to give them something to do, and to utilise the time, that the plan was hit upon of calling for a Report on Smyrna in reference to the sanitary and other aspects of the place. They received, I think, no particular instructions, but they collected a great deal of useful and valuable information, which is embodied in Mr. Rolleston’s Report, dated Nov. 1, 1856. The abrupt termination of the war consigned it, like many other Reports, to the waste-paper basket.’

The Report which thus came into existence is probably even now the best guide-book to Smyrna which a traveller or merchant could have. Among other matters, the writer’s experience enables him to write with authority on the malaria fever, the terror of Europeans in the East. Comparing the conditions of Ephesus, where it is said that no European can sleep without contracting a fever, of Mersina, the port of Tarsus, and of Alexandretta, where the inhabitants sleep in wooden cages set on poles 10 to 12 feet above the earth, he comes to the conclusion that the one effective condition for generating malarious fever is not abundant vegetation, is not marshy soil, nor any one season of the year, but marshy ground in the process of dessication under the influence of solar heat. [14] The one condition common to all three places in question is marshy ground, nearly or quite exhausted of its moisture by solar heat. As an illustration he quotes a warning given him by a Consul at Tripoli to avoid mulberries, because all experience shows that they cause the pernicious fever. Now logically, this caution was an instance of that commonest of fallacies, post hoc propter hoc, but scientifically interpreted it contains a certain amount of truth and should be thus read; the sun has just got power enough to ripen the mulberries; the marshy ground will be now [p. xxv] just on the point of complete drying, and malaria, consequently, just in the prime of its strength. In discussing the various nationalities of Smyrna, Rolleston claims the Greeks there as genuine representatives and descendants of the ancient Hellenes. The characteristic bearing and expression of the old models of Greek art are, he says, constantly brought before our minds as we meet the modern Greek in the streets. The seafaring Greek seemed to him like the Odysseus of the ancient sculptors, not only in general expression, but in details in limb and feature, lips, nose, eyes, hair, and forehead. The Greeks of Asia Minor have been much less intermixed with foreign blood than those in Greece Proper, and kept their Romaic speech even when Albanian was spoken in Athens, and [Greek text] Nor have the Anatolian Greeks adopted the Albanian fustanella or kilt, [15] as the modern Hellenes have done, but wear the loose blue calico breeches, the jacket, and the long loose red cap like the Phrygian. [16] As to the national qualities of Greeks and Turks, so important a factor in the politics of the East, the report is scrupulously fair. This comes out clearly and also quaintly in an appendix on a Turkish industry, the making of fig-drums of bent wood. Of course the square shape is better for packing, but a remark is added that the shape of the box depends on the orders of the exporter, so that it is incorrect to ascribe the persistence of the round shape obstinate and irrational preference for that which is old, simply because it is old, which the Turk really does show in so many instances. Rolleston had soon seen enough of the Turks to understand the hopelessness of turning them into a civilised Western nation. The declining glory of the East was everywhere plain to him. ‘The war,’ he used to say in after years, ‘has killed the old reverence. How can it last? I saw a quite grand old ragged sheikh, a sort of Turkish Quixote, at the head of his little troop, come down to the beach on his mule just as soon French and English sailors were going by, and one of the Frenchmen, egged on by one of our tars, went up to the old fellow and gave his beard a pull.’ A letter, written as late as [p. xxvi] Dec. 22, 1877, to his friend the Russian archaeologist, Baron de Bogushevski, [17] describes the change of political ideas which experience of the East brought about in his mind: ‘Well, Plevna [18] has not delighted you more than it has me; I have read all the accounts which I have been able to read with as much pleasure as ever I read any account of any English victory. It is a most grievous thing for any wholesome mind to regard with sympathy incarnate cruelty and lust, which sympathy with Turkey represents; and it is a very painful thing for any patriotic mind to know that a party sympathising with such lower forms of life as Turkey and her social institutions and traditions can be found among his own countrymen. But I ought to say that I was once nearly as great a savage as these my countrymen are now. I was a “Civil Doctor,” i.e. a Doctor sent out to the General Hospitals, as you have been told, during the Crimean war-time, and I recollect an older and a wiser man saying to me, that it was wholly wrong of us English to be fighting for the Turks, Christians as we were, against you. At that time, it was early in my experience of Turkey, I was quite surprised and shocked at this view, which however I came to see was right, after seeing more of the filthy barbarians than I had then done. I was set to write a Report which was printed, though not published, by our War Office, upon the whole of what I had seen during the whole time I was in Government pay, and in that what I thought and said of the Turks was much what I should say now after visiting Turkey again in 1871. Most Englishmen however, as a rule, know nothing whatever of the Turks, their principal ideas being drawn from the pictures they see on pickle-pots of a fellow in a turban and loose breeches swallowing a fish whole! Indeed they are in much the same Stygian darkness that I was in myself till I saw them for myself. I am sending you through your agents a number of the “Contemporary Review,” in which there is a an article by my great idol, Goldwin Smith, [19] on our state of mind as to this business, and you will see that the same men who were on the side of slavery and brutishness and the lower [p. xxvii] civilisation generally in the American North and South war, are still true to their Devil worship.’

Rolleston's service in the East came to an end in 1856, when a letter to his sister from Alexandria, June 12, shows him returned from a tour in Palestine, and on his way back to England. The next year he held for a short time the appointment of Assistant-Physician to the Hospital for Sick Children in London. In a letter to Miss Beever dated July 5, 1857, he writes of his disappointment that the Smyrna Report was not to be re-printed as a Blue-Book, but he was looking forward to taking his M.D. degree at Oxford, and fully occupied.[20] 'I see on an average about 60 fresh cases of children from a few days old up to 12 years every week, besides old cases. You will see that this is a fair field for labour, and I hope to be allowed to be of some use to my fellow-creatures in my generation. I strive certainly to do my duty, and if God gives me health and strength I hope to continue to do so in this post for some time. ... I see a good deal of the London poor by this means, and though I find among them much stupidity and brutishness, I nevertheless see more of qualities which are estimable. Love and self-denial I see constantly, and I make it my business to encourage these qualities and to prevent their being neutralised as they so constantly are by ignorance of the very commonest things. I don't at all object to saffron, which is given by most London mothers for most diseases in perfect faith, but I wage daily war against veal and bacon, pork and cheese, for infants of seven months old and upwards. Some mothers I find, with the greatest affection for their infants, still will not ever become sensible that special emergencies need special practices, and that habits, however old-established, must under critical circumstances be broken through. They resemble the authorities in the late war, who sacrificed 10,000 lives rather than re-arrange their habits. A child I find, out of the Hospital, of course, who requires attention from one hour to another, will get it till 10 P.M. when its mother goes to bed, but no longer, unless great pains be taken to drive in the notion that mother's habits and [p. xxviii] child's necessities may occasionally clash. What a rare event the acquisition of a new notion must be however to the working classes with their dull grey life. Their minds are as unused to it as their stomachs to turtle, and are as little able to bear with it. But among my own friends I can count several men of great acquirements and education in the past who have reached the happy stage of finality and never take in any new notion whatever. It seems to be a painful process to them—even the very attempt to do so. This is a Whig state of mind, and while it is to be found in the upper, what are we to expect in the lower classes of life? However, after all, even the exercise of my powers of persuasion as distinguished from those of prescription is attended with pleasure, except in the case of the Irish, whom I have long learnt to consider as unamenable to reason or indeed anything else.' A few weeks later he continues, 'For my own part, I am working at my Children ... They are very interesting in many ways, having first of all less of the tarnish and soil which longer life in this world never fails to smear over us, and secondly having the claims to pity which in addition to those which all sick folk have, they possess, as suffering without having brought their suffering on their own heads by their own fault. The people I object to are husbands; their cruelty and savagery are very great obstacles even to the bodily health of their children, and are totally destructive of everything else of a higher kind. But this I do not see so often as I see self-denial and exertion on the part of the wife, indeed these qualities are called for whenever the husband is of the above kind, and on many other occasions also. Every now and then I find women taking care of children whose mothers cannot, from disease or poverty, though they themselves are only one grade better off. This is most pleasing, as proving the existence of real goodness, as poverty allows of no luxury, not even of the luxury of doing good. Supporting and feeding another person's child gratis is something for people to do who buy fresh meat three times a week, and their tea and sugar by the quarter-pound.' This letter is dated 13 Henrietta [p. xxix] St., Cavendish Square, where the now Dr. Rolleston had his name on a brass-plate on the door. But the prospect of a London physician's life was to change very soon to a different view.

Before the end of 1857, the death of Dr. Ogle, Physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford, [21] brought Rolleston back there, armed with a pamphlet full of praises from medical authorities. The laudatory flavour of testimonials makes them, when their occasion is past, as hard reading as epitaphs, but there is a sentence in one of these from Dr. Jeune, [22] which must be quoted as recording a notable moment in Rolleston's earlier Oxford career:—'That on leaving Oxford, to follow his medical career in London, he took with him his vigorous application and quick perception, was proved by his Examination for the Degree of Bachelor of Medicine; at the close of it, the three Examiners, all men of celebrity, rose and publicly thanked him in my presence for the Examination which he had passed—an unprecedented distinction.' It is not surprising that Rolleston's friend who was his one serious competitor retired, leaving the course free for him. The same year Dr. (now Sir Henry W.) Acland (one of the three examiners above mentioned) was made Regius Professor of Medicine, vacating the Lee's Readership in Anatomy at Christ Church, whereupon the Dean and Chapter appointed Dr. Rolleston his successor. This office is one of historical interest, as the germ out of which the Science School of Oxford has been largely developed. In 1765, Dr. Matthew Lee founded at Christ Church a Museum of Anatomy, in the building where now is the Chemical Laboratory. But it was not a flourishing foundation when Dr. Acland came back to Oxford to be installed as Reader, and found himself master of the gloomy musty room where a human skeleton hanging by the top of its head to an old brown cord was conspicuous at once as apparatus and ornament. Scarcely any one ever came into this old-world place to inspect the anatomical preparations which embodied the then most advanced Physiology. Dreary as was the outlook of Natural Science in those days, the new period [p. xxx]. of growth had begun. The extensive series of dissections made under Dr. Acland, out of which grew the present collections of Comparative Anatomy in the University Museum, had laid the foundations of its Biological department, and when his Readership passed on to Dr. Rolleston, the almost extinct teaching had become a reality in the University. Rolleston carried on the work between two and three years, and a proof of his success in carrying his class with him may be found in the remark of Professor Bartholomew Price, [23] that although the Pembroke students were now no longer bound to attend Professors' lectures, the number of the Lee's Reader's auditors increased instead of falling off. Rolleston began by the usual medical combination of private practice with teaching, and he seems to have been popular as a physician, but as time went on he came more and more to see that his work had to be done in the world rather as an instructor than as a practitioner. A letter he wrote to his sister on Dec. 24, 1859 (he was then living at No. 5, Broad Street, Oxford) is a good example of his manner, while its ending shows how his mind was settling on to its permanent lines. 'I have at this moment in my care a girl of 14, who has had a very bad fever with relapses ... but is very likely to get sound and well. The people of this part of the world have very low wages in the country villages, and are in consequence as brutish as can be imagined. This child is half Pig and half Tiger-cat. The other day I was poking a stick of caustic [24] into her throat to stop an uvula cough, when, as I withdrew the holder, she snapped at it like a dog snapping at a whip. She gripped the holder, set the caustic-stick free, and down her throat it went. By Jove, you should have seen her face as the burning stick went down. There was not a moment to be lost, and I got a salt-cellar full of salt and poured it down her throat to neutralise the nitrate of silver. As the salt got down the pain left her face, but I was in an awful fright. So was she, but the Tiger-cat soon awoke again as the pain ceased for the moment. But there was a good lot of nitrate of silver I knew as yet unneutralised, and getting a wooden peg I poured salt [p. xxxi] and water down for about twenty minutes. She was too weak to be sick or less would have done. No evil followed. Was not that fine practical Chemistry? She has lived through it all, and is likely I should judge now to live, as if that business could not nothing else is likely to kill her, and she is now on Quinine and Cod-liver oil, and the Pig-nature is showing itself, salt having killed the Tiger-cat, as salted meat usually does the Carnivora. I dwell on this professional bit of my life, as the Professorial is now so much overlaying the former. It is very demoralising this having to work two lines simultaneously, but I think I see my way now toward getting rid of the former of the two. Possibly this confession, which I do not wish to be made public, may cause you to lose any little confidence you might have had in me in my capacity of Practising Doctor. I will send you by this post, however, an Oxford almanac in which you will see me to full extent in my Professorial capacity, and being at the same time always at your service in the other too, I am your affectionate brother.'

The new move which was to make Rolleston's future career one of instruction, was his appointment to the recently created Linacre Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, an office belonging to the great scheme of development of Science in Oxford, which was just becoming embodied in the University Museum. This was, from the first, not a museum in the modern sense of a collection of rare and interesting objects, but rather intended to realise in nature as in name the idea of the original Museum of Alexandria, where mathematicians, astronomers, and chemists were gathered together under the same roof engaged in research and teaching, where an anatomical school formed the basis for the education of physicians, and a great library put within the student's reach all the knowledge hitherto amassed. Such a Museum of Science the authorities of the University established, not without many difficulties by the way, for the ornate building in which Mr. Ruskin's [25] ideas found expression proved of vast cost, so that the economical resistance of financiers mingled with the disfavour of those who were jealous of putting [p. xxxii] Natural Science on a par with the old learning. In 1860 the central hall and galleries were opened for the collections which were to provide materials of instruction, and the lecture-rooms for the professors who were to convert these materials into scientific education. Christ Church removed its Anatomical Collection to the University Museum, and the Lee's Reader in Anatomy migrated with it. Dr. Acland induced the Radcliffe Trustees to move the Radcliffe Library thither also, that the Museum might have the best provision of scientific books, while at the same time the Camera, where the Radcliffe Library had been housed, was set free for the more general purposes of a reading-room and annex of the Bodleian. Merton College, having a large fund available for the promotion of Medicine, took the judicious course of creating the Linacre Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, also within the walls of the Museum. When this Chair was founded in 1860, Dr. Rolleston was elected its first occupant, and held it through life. It was a stirring time in the history of Biology when he began his work. Darwin's 'Origin of Species' had set men's mind in movement, though whither this would tend was not yet seen by all. It was destined not indeed to carry Rolleston's mind altogether in its stream, but to shift the direction and force of the current of his thought. A letter to his friend on Jan. 19, 1860, shows him swaying under its first impulse: 'I don't see that you mention Darwin's book; everybody is reading it now and here, and I think if the book were a little better arranged it would make a good many converts. If the chapter on Classification, which is now last but one in the book, were put first, the book would be much more read. As it is, many people are deterred from reading it by the great difficulty of mastering his meaning, as he writes as curtly as Bishop Butler nearly.[26] I am very much amused to find the Hyper-orthodox Americans of the North are driven into unison with the Southern Slaveholders in one point by their fear of Lamarck and the 'Vestiges of Creation.' They have out of utter fear of these views gone into the other extreme of multiplying specific [pxxxiii] centres of creation enormously, and laying it down as an axiom that man was created at different centres of creation, just as they hold other animals to have been. This for the Northerns: of course the Slaveholders join in with great earnestness. The other day, a Black Prince came to my Museum, especially to discover whether his brains were constructed on the same plan as those of the white races. Some Americans had told him the two things were quite different. Without being a Darwinite to the entire length he goes, I cannot avoid being one as far as man goes. ... As it seems to me, however, Archbishop Usher's [27] chronology and the doctrine of the Human Race are non-consistent, and you must give up either St. Paul on Mars' Hill, or the Archbishop as he wrote in Dublin. I am very full of Ethnology just now and am collecting human skulls from all parts.' The interest in the early history of Man thus awakened by the problem of his relation to lower animals as raised by Darwin, came before Rolleston's mind a few months later in a more intense and personal form, in the Zoological Section of the British Association, at a memorable meeting, which Professor Acland, who was present also, mentions twenty years after in his obituary notice of his friend. 'It so happened, that in 1860 a circumstance took place which tended materially to concentrate all the qualities of his nature on the highest biological questions, whether considered from the material or psychological point of view. The British Association met in Oxford, and the famous discussion on the hippocampus in the brain of man as compared with that of the higher apes took place between Professors Owen and Huxley.[28] Bishop Wilberforce [29] brought, as is well remembered by all scientific men, the forces of his ready wit and great reputation to bear against the sincere statements of the younger anatomist. Rolleston's indignation was fired, his sense of justice made him throw heart as well as head into the cause of what, at the moment, seemed the weaker man. It is not possible to say now to what extent that brief scene influenced the ardour and imagination of Rolleston. Be this as it may, all prejudice and even bias derived from the most [p. xxxiv] refined Oxford culture was banished from his mind in dealing with the nature of man.'

The controversy here referred to, one of importance in modern scientific history, lasted several years. It arose at the Oxford meeting just mentioned out of a botanical paper by Dr. Daubeny on the Sexuality of Plants, [30] which went into criticism of Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' Professor Owen, in the discussion which ensued, took up the question of differences between apes and man, asserting that the brain of the Gorilla presented more differences as compared with Man than with the lowest Quadrumana. This was met by Professor Huxley with a flat denial, he declaring that the brains of man and the highest monkeys differ less than the brains of the highest and lowest monkeys. Rolleston does not appear to have spoken at this time, nor on the occasion a day or two later when the Bishop of Oxford received a famous rebuke for the rhetorical device of perverting the Darwinian theory in order to make fun of it. But this problem of brain-classification became an especial subject of Rolleston's study, and in January 1862 he delivered a lecture upon it at the Royal Institution, which is republished in the present volume. At the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1862, Professor Owen renewed the contest, bringing it to a direct issue by reading a paper 'On the Zoological Significance of the Brain and Limb Characters of Man.' Appealing to his own system of classification of the Mammalia by differences of brain structure, he exhibited casts of the brains of gorilla and man, saying that he had placed Man—owing to the prominence of the posterior lobes of his brain, the existence of a posterior cornu in the lateral ventricles, and the presence of a hippocampus minor in the posterior cornu—in a distinct sub-kingdom, which he had called Archencephala. He considered that the sudden advance of the human brain, and the hiatus between that highest grade of structure and the next step below attained by the orangs, chimpanzees, and gorilla, was one of the most extraordinary in the whole range of Comparative Anatomy, associated with Man's intellectual capacity, his power of framing general propositions [p. xxxv] and of expressing thought in articulate speech. Professor Huxley answered that he had controverted the assertions made for years by Professor Owen as to the differences in brain between man and the highest apes; he called upon Professors Rolleston, Flower, and Vrolik, to say whether the universal voice of Continental and British anatomists had not entirely borne out his statements, and refuted those of Professor Owen. Professor Rolleston on this went into the whole question on its merits, in a speech which, putting together the newspaper reports and his own notes, seems to have been somewhat as follows:—He said that the facts stated by Professor Huxley were supported by the evidence of the photographic process, referring to the 'Natural History Review' for April and July 1861, and to his own Royal Institution lecture above mentioned. He would try to supply the members of the Association with the points of positive difference between the human and the ape's brain. For doing this we had been abundantly shown that the hippocampus minor and the posterior lobe were insufficient. Without employing that analysis of the brain's convolutions which we owe to Gratiolet, [31] it is impossible to differentiate the brains of man and the apes fully and fairly. Professor Owen had himself spoken of the determination of the difference between Homo and Pithecus as being 'the anatomist's difficulty.' It was plain, therefore, that the differentiation of the human from the simious encephalon was not such an easy matter as many persons might suppose, and it was but recently that the means for effecting this differentiation had been discovered. What Gratiolet had done for the anatomy of the brain might be compared with the work of Adams in astronomy, and of Max Muller in language, and without a reference to his writings it was impossible for a lecturer on this subject to treat either it or his audience fairly. This analysis had enabled us to point out great differences, and widely-swerving characteristics, which the rough and empirical methods of ordinary brain anatomy were wholly incompetent to reveal to us. On Mr. Darwin's principle of the great importance of rudimentary organs for classificatory [p. xxxvi] purposes, which the schoolmen had expressed in the wider words ‘Nusquam magis quam in minimis tota est natura’ and which we might express in plain English by saying that 'Small things speak plainly of great issues,’ the general public had been right in clinging to such a structure as was the hippocampus minor as a mark and means for differentiating man from the apes. As, however, this nodule of neurine had been rent away from their hands, it was right that something should be supplied to take its place. The analysis of the brain's structure had established as differentiative between man and the ape four great differences—two morphological, two quantitative. The two quantitative, which we can detect without having recourse to Gratiolet's method, are the great absolute weight and the great absolute height of the human brain. The two morphological are the multifidity, the great complexity and evolution of the frontal lobes corresponding to the forehead, usually, popularly, and as this analysis shows, correctly, taken as a fair exponent of mans intelligence—and the presence in the apes and absence in man of the deep cleft, 'the external perpendicular fissure,' in the posterior part of the hemispheres. No reference to these important matters of Gratiolet's analysis had been made by Professor Owen, and this omission could not fail to put the British Association's repute for acquaintance with the work of foreign fellow-labourers at great disadvantage in the eyes of such foreigners as might be present. Professor Rolleston concluded by saying that if he had expressed himself with any unnecessary vehemence he was sorry for it, but he felt there were things less excusable than vehemence, and that the law of ethics and love of truth were things higher and better than were the rules of etiquette or decorous reticence.

Among the notices of this speech of Rolleston's, which made considerable impression, is a mention of it in Kingsley's squib ' Speech of Lord Dundreary in Section D. on Friday last, on the Great Hippocampus Question.' [32] This, which rather well represents the perplexity of the lay mind at an abstruse anatomical disputation, is republished in Kingsley's 'Life,' chap, xix, and followed by a letter written to Rolleston by Kingsley (Oct. 12, 1862), who [p. xxxvii] found in some remark of Rolleston's a support to his own belief that 'the soul of each living being, down to the lowest, secretes the body thereof, as a snail secretes its shell.' There seems however to have been no more ground for supposing Rolleston inclined toward this mediaeval doctrine, than he was to the idea which Kingsley asks him in the same letter to reconsider, that the gorilla and baboon brain are degraded forms (apparently from the human). A few days after this, Rolleston writes an elaborate letter to the 'Medical Times and Gazette' (published Oct. 18, 1862), giving particulars of his own late speech, continuing the argument on brain-classification, and ending with the following paragraph as to the bearing of his scientific research on his religious belief:—'I may say, in conclusion, that it has always been clear to me that the true relation of man's body to his soul, to the world in which he lives, and to the Governor of it, can never be fully elucidated either by physiological or psychological researches, nor yet by both combined. The saying of Favorinus, viz.:—

‘On earth there is nothing great but man;

In man there is nothing great but mind'—

may be taken as an adequate expression of the results in which such researches by themselves would land and leave us. Nor need we, when writing as men of science, add anything to this dictum of a pagan philosopher. But, thinking in our privacy as Christian men, we feel that this expression no longer covers all the facts within our knowledge, and that events, now nineteen centuries old, necessitate some modifications of it.'

In 1861 Dr. Rolleston married Grace, daughter of Dr. John Davy, and niece of Sir Humphry Davy. [33] For the first years of their married life their home was 15 New Inn Hall Street, a well-preserved seventeenth-century house, said to have been built by Vanbrugh; and in 1866 they moved to a house they had built in South Parks Road, close to the Museum, where the labour of his life went on. Rolleston had now found his way to a position giving full scope to the teaching power by which he mainly made his mark in the world. This kind of power, [p. xxxviii] real and striking as it may be to personal experience, does not lend itself easily to description. Some accounts written down at different times of his life may give an idea of the memory of him which remains in the minds of the few who taught him and the many who learnt from him. One of his students writes:—'During the years 1868-9, when reading for the School of Natural Science at Oxford, I had the privilege of studying Physiology and Comparative Anatomy under the direction of Dr. Rolleston. ... His lectures were always most thorough. With a profound knowledge of the subject on hand he combined a happy power of bringing that knowledge within our reach. His voice was peculiarly pleasant, his pronunciation so clear that I never missed a word, though the lecture-room was large and crowded. There was a deep earnestness about his manner, which could not fail to impart a reflection of earnestness to his hearers. He encouraged us to take notes of his lectures, and was particularly careful to insist that we made a fair copy of those notes. This he would look over with considerable attention; on referring to my note-books I am struck with the thoroughness of his scrutiny. Not only did he correct all mistakes, but often filled up omissions, inserting much valuable matter. Those note-books, containing copious additions from his honoured hand, cannot fail to be a lasting and valued memorial of him to all who are fortunate in their possession. He did not consider his duty towards us completed when the lecture was over and its notes corrected. If it was often hard for us to attend the Museum in the Summer afternoons, the hardness was always alleviated by the reflection that "the Doctor" was sure to be there. The Court of the Museum is fitted up with enclosures in which the student finds a table and chair. He draws the curtain and settles himself down to studying the various specimens arranged on shelves round his enclosure. The Book of explanations lay ready on the table, written in Dr. Rolleston's own hand; he was perfectly familiar with the many thousand specimens that the Museum contains. He would often visit us in these hours of private study, and ask if we had any difficulty, [p. xxxix] and invite a few of us to look round some case of specimens, and by a little practical demonstration contrive to throw a life and interest into the dead and dried preparations, where before all was dark and unintelligible.' Nor did his teaching cease with Term-time, for in the Long Vacation he used to organise a sea-side working party to dredge and to study the anatomy of marine animals, when the enthusiasm for biological investigation he could arouse in fellow-students and pupils is still admiringly remembered.

The following reminiscences by Professor Louis C. Miall, [34] of the Leeds College of Science, contain an accurate estimate of Dr. Rolleston's qualities as a teacher and lecturer:—'I well recollect my first introduction to Professor Rolleston, then on a visit to Bradford. He found me trying to explore the intricacies of Biology without direction. At that moment I was dissecting a chimpanzee. He took up the subject easily, and spent a great part of two days upon it. No pains were spared in demonstration and explanation; the dry anatomical facts were insisted upon, but enlivened by plenty of discursive talk. To a mere beginner, ignorant and almost helpless, this instruction was memorable indeed, and after fifteen years I look back upon it with deep gratitude. When I had the good fortune to meet Professor Rolleston in after years, he was always full of friendliness; to tell him anything new, or to point out to him a new process, was a service overpaid by the kindest acknowledgments. A question, or merely that attention which it was a pleasure to give, would encourage him to talk on any point of anatomy or natural history, and always so pleasantly and with such mastery of his subject that the lesson was easily remembered. One little trick of manner often amused me. He would give his friend full credit and more for any bit of knowledge which he happened to possess, and would speak deferentially, as if subject to correction, to a man infinitely his inferior. "To you who have studied so-and-so," he would say, "these things are perfectly familiar, but I well remember the surprise with which I learned that," &c. It was useless to protest against this imputation of superior knowledge, [p. xl] which a conversation on any subject whatever was enough to refute, and one had to acquiesce in being treated as a kind of authority upon the very subject which he was putting in a perfectly new light. A walk round a Museum with Professor Rolleston was a treat I more than once enjoyed. He would take up topic after topic, some great and some small, and pour out his stores of precise and often recondite knowledge, always delighted to be questioned, and glad of any appearance of receiving information. I remember how once a turn was given to our talk by the chance mention of a piece of rascally cruelty inflicted upon animals. I remember the rush of indignant words, and the excitement which could not abate till he had uttered his passionate exclamation. Professor Rolleston's popular lectures are in many persons' recollection; they were odd in many ways, immensely discursive, often dwelling upon details more curious than important, and overlaying the subject with an excess of illustration. There was always an infinity of unfamiliar matter, discussion of passages in classical historians, quaint applications of the rules of logic, rectification of words, and something of the flavour of the learned and rather whimsical writers of the seventeenth century, such as Burton, Fuller, and Sir Thomas Browne. [35] Two characteristics never failed to redeem these dis- courses from any suspicion of triviality. The facts were minutely accurate, and they were made to converge upon one point with an effect which was only impaired by their profusion and vivacity.' Such remarks, at once appreciative and critical, will be read with far more lively interest than any mere panegyric. Rolleston was a man whose mind and character were built on a large enough scale to allow of the full all-sided truth being told about him. A further aid to realising him will be found in the judgment of him by his instructor first, and friend afterwards, Mr. Savory, F.R.S.,[36] the eminent surgeon:—'What always struck me in Rolleston was his abounding energy, his profuse mental activity. While awake his mind seemed never to be in a state of comparative repose. It was constantly striving at the solution of some problem or other, either in argument or discussion, or in a [p. xli] long monologue delivered with extraordinary rapidity, to which he had no difficulty in compelling his friends to listen. His exceeding volubility was indeed a striking part of him, and a very characteristic one. He was perhaps the most fluent and rapid talker I have ever known. When elated and once fairly off, his rattle of words was amazing. But although they were poured forth at a prodigious rate, it was evident that they did not come fast enough for his thoughts. In fact, though he rarely talked nonsense, and was oftentimes singularly brilliant in speech, his thoughts and words appeared sometimes to escape from his control. This was most marked in a set discourse or a lecture. He started a subject or a line of thought. Ideas and speculations from all quarters soon crowded in. One after another was taken up and pursued at a tremendous pace, until at length we were watching a torrent of words on some question as remote as possible from the subject which originally provoked it. Thus when once in the Chair at our inaugural dinner on the 1st of October he rose to propose "Prosperity to the Medical School," and in less than five minutes he was discussing with great vehemence the origin of the word "clan." On another occasion he began a lecture, the subject of which was to have been "Ancient Skulls," but towards the end a large part of it was taken up by a criticism of the merits, as a writer, of Diodorus Siculus. [37] This striking feature of Rolleston's intellect goes very far, I think, to explain the character of his work. It was abundant, clever, brilliant, but too diffuse and fragmentary. He touched many things, and most of them with effect, but he produced nothing wholly worthy of himself. He was certainly far greater than he appeared to be in any work he has left behind him. Rolleston was indeed richly endowed in intellectual gifts. He had splendid abilities, a marvellous memory abundantly laden, a fertile imagination, a singularly quick and clear apprehension,—much in his mental constitution which might be called genius, and overwhelming energy; but lacking somewhat perhaps of the power of patient thought, of steady and sustained reflection. His will was not perhaps fully equal to the direction [p. xlii] of his intellectual faculties. The charm of his character, the beauty of his nature, was recognised by all. His heart was worthy of his head. It may go without saying that Rolleston was in a high degree a conscientious man, and he had the courage of his opinions. And who that knew him will forget his tender sympathy with the weak and suffering, his honest dislike of tortuous and secret ways, his manly scorn of all that is mean or ignoble, his delicate sensibility, his subtle humour, his refined taste, his keen appreciation of beauty and of the nobler side of things, his ardent love of truth and his reverence for the highest forms of it 1 He was a noble man, in whom was mingled to the last much of the delightful nature of the boy. Few, very few, could be named who combined so much sweetness with so much light.'

Most of Rolleston's research and writing was henceforth directly connected with his Professorship. The subjects he had to deal with may be best described by quoting from the Obituary notice of the Royal Society, of which he was elected Fellow in 1862, written by his friend Professor W.H. Flower:—‘The duties of the Linacre Professorship involved the teaching of a wide range of subjects included under the terms of physiology and anatomy, human and comparative, to which he added the hitherto neglected but important subject of anthropology, as well as the care of a great and ever-growing museum. In the present condition of scientific knowledge it requires a man of very versatile intellect and extensive powers of reading to maintain anything like an adequate acquaintance with the current literature of any one of these subjects, much more to undertake original observations on his own account. Even a man of Rolleston's powers felt the impossibility of any one person doing justice to the Chair as thus constituted, and strongly urged the necessity of dividing it into three professorships, one of physiology, one of comparative anatomy, and one of human anatomy and anthropology. The work which he did however contrive to find time to publish, and by which he will be chiefly known to posterity, is remarkable for its thoroughness. He never committed himself to [p. xliii] writing without having completely mastered everything that had been previously written upon the subject, and his memoirs bristle with quotations from, and references to, authors of all ages and all nations. The abundance with which these were supplied by his wonderful memory, and the readiness with which, both in speaking and writing, his thoughts clothed themselves with appropriate words, sometimes made it difficult for ordinary minds to follow the train of his argument through long and voluminous sentences, often made up of parenthesis within parenthesis. The work which was most especially the outcome of his professorial duties is the "Forms of Animal Life," published at the Clarendon Press in 1870. Though written chiefly with a view to the needs of the University students, it is capable of application to more general purposes, and is one of the earliest and most complete examples of instruction by the study of a series of types, now becoming so general. As he says in the preface, "The distinctive character of the book consists in its attempting so to combine the concrete facts of zootomy with the outlines of systematic classification, as to enable the student to put them for himself into their natural relations of foundation and superstructure. The foundation may be wider, and the superstructure may have its outlines not only filled up, but even considerably altered by subsequent and more extensive labours; but the mutual relations of the one as foundation and the other as superstructure which this book particularly aims at illustrating, must always remain the same." Rolleston's desire that his professorship should be divided into more manageable departments was not fulfilled in his lifetime, but the University has since partly carried out his recommendations, his field of work being now occupied by the Linacre Professor of Human and Comparative Anatomy (Professor Moseley), [38] the Waynflete Professor of Physiology (Professor Burdon-Sanderson), [39] and the Reader in Anthropology (Dr. E.B. Tylor). [40] One of the latest tasks which Rolleston took up, the pressure of which indeed shortened his life, was to embody the new and ever-growing results of comparative anatomy in a fresh edition of his [p. xliv] own book. Though he did not live to complete this undertaking, it has not been neglected; his plans are being carried out by his former pupil and demonstrator Mr. W. Hatchett Jackson, [41] who looks to completing the work in its new form in 1885, and who in the meantime has contributed several characteristic touches to the present memoir.

Of Rolleston's style as a medical writer, no more characteristic specimen can be seen than the Harveian Oration which he was called upon by the College of Physicians to deliver in 1873. Combining anatomist and scholar as he did, he was able to make this, not a mere panegyric or medical thesis, but a contribution to scientific history, elucidating for the first time various points in the great discoverer's career, and his relation to contemporaries and rivals. This oration, which attracted great attention among the Faculty, is here reprinted (Art. xli), and in its latter pages the non-professional reader will be interested to find stated Harvey's position as the real demonstrator of the circulation, working by methods so new that he sometimes not unreasonably feared he should set all men against him. The examination of contemporary records made by Rolleston for this purpose has added also to our biographical knowledge of Harvey, whose college life and philosophical thought have much of that diffused interest which genius throws beyond the limits of its actual path.

Wide as was the main work of Rolleston's life, it was not in his character to keep within its limits. Where discursive thought led him into adjacent subjects, he would follow the track; and this he did on principle, holding that his mind was the better for its many-sidedness. Indeed he had a stock formula to express contempt for a man who was only classical or only scientific—‘Stupid fool, he can only do one thing.' Though he doubtless lost much force by thus expending himself in too many directions, there must be set against this his gain by making one thing bear on another. Talking once to his present biographer of the way in which he found his anatomy and classics and antiquarian research converge on the study of man, he illustrated [p. xlv] his experience by a story he had heard of a famous row in the Dublin Theatre. A man in the gallery had got another in his arms and was in the act of pitching him over, when a voice from below was heard to cry, 'Don't waste the man, kill a fiddler wid him.' 'So I never throw away a fact,' the Professor moralised, 'it is sure to have its use somewhere.' One practical good gained by many-sided sympathies and tastes was in the effect he had in stimulating those who came to see him at the Museum; they would go away with new interests implanted in them, and often, especially when they were stationed or travelling in distant countries, they would do useful scientific work. All over the world he had friends eagerly collecting specimens for him. His sympathy with missionaries stood him in good stead in this way, and much friendly intercourse arose, as for instance with Mr. Whitmee [42] the missionary and philologist, who became acquainted with him through a specimen of the Didunculus strigirostris, the nearest living relative of the Dodo, and which now inhabits the same case with the skeleton of that famous bird.

In the line of Anthropology, his chief publication was his part of Greenwell [43] and Rolleston's 'British Barrows.' [Footnote 1] The two friends had spent many delightful days on the Yorkshire wolds, searching the burial-mounds of ancient chiefs on the wild moors and ferny hill-sides where they have as yet escaped destruction at the hands of the ditcher and the ploughman. Canon Greenwell devoted himself especially to the archaeological objects found, and Dr. Rolleston to the human remains. He considered the collection of skulls figured in the volume to confirm the easily remembered rule that the long barrows of the stone age were the graves of a long-skulled people then dwelling in the land. In burial-mounds of later times, generally round, remains of men of both narrow and wide type of skull [p. xlvi] are found, as if the new broad-skulled people had not exterminated but mingled with their narrow-skulled predecessors. By what national names these races ought to be called is a question only answerable as yet in the vaguest way, and indeed not likely ever to be fully answered. But it will always have an attraction for historians and anthropologists, who will find it treated largely and soberly by Rolleston. The early skull-type of the long barrows he connects with the black-haired type still prevalent in the West of England, shorter in stature, feebler in development, and with a narrower skull than the men of the fair tint of skin and hair. To the old narrow-headed population he inclines to give the name Silurian, after the well-known passage of Tacitus (Agr. II) about the natives of Britain. He protests against the name Iberian, now often used with the implication that an early population of Britain came across from Spain. Such a name should not, he considered, be given without definite reasons, and he points his protest by a quotation from Professor Rhys [44] that the tradition of an old connexion between Ireland and Spain may be nothing but an etymological myth founded on the similarity of the names Iberus and Hibernus. To the broad-skulled type of men who come in with the round burial-mounds he gives the name Cimbric, from likeness of skull between these bronze-using Britons and the Danes whose country was once known as the Cimbric peninsula. Among the less technical parts of the volume are studies of the civilisation of the ancient races of Britain. While the earliest known of these, the men of the palaeolithic period contemporaries of the mammoths, lived in England when its hills and plains had not yet their present contour, the later neolithic men whose remains are found in the long barrows belong to a time when the outline of the country had come much into its present shape, for their forts and burial-mounds stand on high places of view and vantage which show that their land already had its escarpments and river-courses much as at this day. These stone-age tribes of Britain were inferior to the stone-age lake-dwellers of Switzerland, whose communication with the Mediterranean [p. xlvii] nations had given them corn, unknown to our early hunters and fishers. It is pointed out how the honey of the rude ancients was got at first from the wild bees, till the device was hit upon of imitating the hollow trees where they built, by making artificial structures of bark to house them in. These earliest hives keep a record of their former use in the French word ruche, from Latin rusca, 'bark,' though it is now many ages since they were superseded by hives of basket-work.

One of Rolleston's favourite objects of contemplation on his frequent journeys as he watched the varying landscape was the change brought about by man since the ages before history; how different the trees are from those the old Silurians looked upon, especially how the hedgerows are now marked by lines of elms which, though rarely seeding in this climate, have propagated themselves by suckers since Roman times. He worked this subject out in one of the Glasgow science lectures and in a paper read before the Geographical Society in 1879 (here re-printed, vol. ii. p. 769). Readers who follow the problem of tracing the periods at which our country was stocked with its domestic animals, or are interested in the serious practical harm which reckless cutting down of forests has done to the climates of such countries as Egypt, Greece, and India, will find it well worth while to peruse the multifarious information in this lecture. And though the addresses of presidents of sections of the British Association are apt to be forgotten when they have' answered their temporary purpose, Rolleston's, of which several are printed in the present volumes, will still yield ideas. If there was one place more than another where he was in his element, it was at the British Association. It was not merely that like plenty of other speakers he had something informing to say on many subjects—he had the power of making his words send out as it were intellectual waves, succeeding one another till he had brought his whole audience into sympathetic vibration. When he presided, his powerful presence made him really master of the situation. A letter to the 'Times,' written by his friend Prebendary Buckle, gives no unfair idea of his excellence in this [p. xlviii] capacity, as seen at the sub-section of Anthropology at Bristol in 1875: 'he had contrived to gather round his presidential chair some of the leading men in literary as well as in physical science, and those who had the good fortune to be present will not easily forget the intellectual tournament, which from day to day filled the room to the very doorways and riveted the interest of "the audience, and in which he held the scales and adjusted the palm with the skill and authority of an acknowledged master ... Among the many fields in which Professor Rolleston will be sorely missed, the arena of the British Association will not be the least.’ His Address at this meeting (p. 880) took up several anthropological topics of wide interest. Bagehot had remarked, and Darwin quoted his remark, that ‘savages did not formerly waste away before the classical nations as they do now before modern civilised nations; had they done so the old moralists would have mused over the event; but there is no lament in any writer of the period over the perishing barbarians.' Rolleston had been struck at the first reading with the beauty and originality of this passage, but on second thoughts he asked himself whether it was safe to argue that there were no perishing barbarians from the silence of the classical writers about them, any more than it would be safe to say that Stonehenge was not standing because the Romans did not mention it. The conclusion of this address shows how thoroughly the speaker took the study of Anthropology to be the study of Human Progress, and how the pessimistic doctrine that the world is going more and more to the bad, a theory just then beginning to hold up its head anew in Europe, seemed to him irreconcilable with the facts. A good example of his fresh way of dealing even with well-worn topics is to be found in his paper on the Iron, Bronze, and Stone Ages (p. 660). One would hardly have expected to find such a subject treated with new lights in the Transactions of a local Archaeological Society, but it is plain that the writer having undertaken to read a paper, as his manner was, put his whole force into it. No one had shown so clearly that the effect on civilisation ordinarily attributed to [p. xlix] the use of iron belonged rather to the introduction of steel, as the old hunters and warriors had little motive to give up their bronze weapons for soft iron ones not practically superior to them. Both from this point of view, and in looking to Central Asia rather than to Britain or the Far East as the earliest source of bronze, this paper is of mark. Some interesting points as to the succession of iron, bronze, and stone weapons are raised by Dr. Rolleston in unpublished letters to his friend Mr. John Evans. [45] In one he remarks on Professor Schaaffhausen's [46] assertion that in some of the Mithra sculptures on the Rhine the bull is being slain, not with the ordinary ornamented metal sword, but with what appears to be a stone hatchet. This clearly proved (which however it does not seem to have been) would be an interesting case of keeping up an ancient weapon for ceremonial purposes, as in the parallel case of the flint (silex saxum) with which the Roman pontifex slew the sacrificial ox. The same line is followed in another letter commenting on a heavy sword of one piece of bronze, with a bull-dog's head for the pommel of the hilt, in the Museum of Nismes. This, if a war- sword taken from a foe, would interfere with his opinion that 'there is no evidence to show that the Romans ever crossed their own Iron swords in anger with Bronze ones in the hands of any enemy.' But if it was a sacrificial sword, then during the Bronze period, Bronze must be supposed to have displaced the Silex Saxum in Ritual, and to have retained its place there, when superseded by iron in other activities.’

To turn from Rolleston's scientific work to the part he took in University affairs, his colleagues on Delegacies and on the Hebdomadal Council remember the brilliant oratory with which he often enlivened their debates. His friend the President of Corpus Christi College, who had sat with him at many meetings, thus sketches him in this public capacity: 'The qualities which struck one in Rolleston were the directness of his language, his fearlessness, and his withering contempt for anything he regarded as mean, or cowardly, or finessing. He had a genuine hatred for compromises, which sometimes perhaps made him unnecessarily hard on the proposals of others; but the presence of such an [p. l] element always added force and elevated the tone of any assembly of which he was a member.' Among the measures which he took up strongly was the affiliation to the University of Oxford of colleges intended, like University College, Bristol, to supply local needs. Another proposal which he took part in deserves notice from its intrinsic importance, notwithstanding that it was not carried out. This was that students passing an Examination in the Final School of Natural Science, turning mainly on their proficiency in the branches of science taken up, should receive Degrees in Natural Science, and not in Arts. This proposal was carried in the Hebdomadal Council, but was eventually rejected by Congregation. The objections to the proposed change came partly from those to whom the innovation seemed in itself undesirable, but also partly from those on the scientific side who thought that the recognised stamp of the B.A. degree had more practical value than a B.Sc. degree unfamiliar to the public. As the question of the desirability of conferring Science degrees as is done by the University of London will doubtless arise again at Oxford, it is well to mention Dr. Rolleston's position in the matter. His views on the general subject of Examinations were strongly felt and not less strongly expressed, tested as they had been by years of comparison between a man's class and his merits as judged by the world in after life. No one was more sensible of the use of examinations within limits. Answering an enquiry made by the friends of one of his students, he writes, 'He has been working steadily, but from one cause or another he has not put the results of his work so clearly before me as I could wish. More than once or twice he has been ill at the end of Terms, and left me without the evidence which a terminal Examination, an excellent institution, furnishes us.' It is interesting, however, to notice a certain change in his opinions in the course of experience. In 1863, toward the beginning of his professorial work, he writes to his brother in New Zealand a carefully-considered letter on education, in which he remarks, 'That frequent examinations are an evil to the very best [p. li] men I admit, but it is only to the very best men, who are a very small class, and all human regulations inconvenience somebody; good men are benefited by being obliged to take stock of their attainments, and put them into easily manageable form and shape; bad men, [Greek text] mentally and morally, are saved often from utter ruin by the consciousness that a sword of Damocles is hanging over them, "jamjam lapsura cadentique imminet assimilis," in the shape of a coming examination.' But the longer he taught, the more he became impressed with the harm done to a serious student's career by the pressure to get up subjects in order to answer questions. He tells a favourite and successful pupil that he hopes to get him an appointment 'when you have got rid of these examinations.' Referring to a case where some men were put in a lower class than they were known to have merited he says, 'Such accidents in the very nature of the case will from time to time occur and teach everybody to look to other results besides those of Class Lists.' His desire to alter the Examination system in Oxford increased with years, and one of his last occupations was to set down the results of his experience in a Memorandum. Here he fully acknowledges the value of Examination. The awakening of intellectual activity by its institution at the beginning of the century cannot, he says, be doubted by any one acquainted with the previous condition of Oxford. But Examination has been accepted 'both inside and outside the University as an Institution for imposing Mint Marks and Trade Marks on men who pass through it as First, Second, Third, and Fourth Class-men. I believe (with the Scotch University Commissioners) that this function does more harm than good, and I hold that the Universities ought to be content to divide men into two Classes only, those two to be one Class in alphabetical order of Honour-men, and another, also in alphabetical order, of Pass-men.' More men, he believes, would be encouraged to work for the object of getting above the Pass-man level than are found now to work for the hope of getting one of three or four Classes. But to his mind the strongest argument lies in the notorious misplacements in classing. He draws up a list to show 'a few of the glaring [p. lii] instances in which a man whose talents and even genius had been found by the world at large to be far superior not merely to those of the average First Class-man, but to those of mankind generally, has been placed in a Second or Third Class in an Oxford Examination, and so far as such a verdict could go, stamped with a badge of inferiority, or a false mint mark. Of course thereby more or less injury was done to the man himself, and the public were more or less deceived.' From Genoa, Jan. 13, 1881, he writes to Professor Max Muller:—'I have sent off an extract from a memorandum of mine against our Examination system. The more I think of it, the surer I am that with our system of gambling and cramming for classes we shall never succeed in making the pursuit of knowledge a real end in the University. The largest fact I know about it is that the Scotch Universities Commission, with our plan of a trifld or tetrafid Class List before them, deliberately recommend that there should be only two divisions allowed, viz. Class-men and Pass-men. I wish you would think of it, and if you agree with the view that a multiplicity of Classes I, II, III, and IV intensifies the gambling element, and also produces more cases of injustice and injury than the other plan of one Honour Class and one Pass, do ventilate the plan.' Then follow names of men whose later careers had conspicuously reversed the verdict of the Examiners, including (what is not to be found in the more public Memorandum) a little list of First Class-men whom the world has not thought much of afterwards. How charged Rolleston's mind was with this subject is seen by his following this letter by another, written within a month, from Bordighiera [47]:—'I hear that the University Commission is likely to ask for another year wherein to finish their work, and I suppose therefore, though I am not very sanguine, that we have some more hope of getting them on to lines with a somewhat broader gauge than they are upon at present. The reform of all others which is the most important is the reform of the Examination system. It really rules everything almost which Oxford has in the way of activity; by virtue of its gambling element it possesses an attractiveness [p. liii] which no other purer rewards or pursuits can have. I see from my window Monaco with its Prince, its Jesuits and their schools, its nunneries, and its mediaeval castle lately underpinned and plastered up; and under it the modern Monte Carlo with its modern appliances of all kinds and its gambling Casino, and I feel that this latter place represents the Examination system with its excitement, its gambling, its power to dull aspiration of every better kind, and its all but entire monopoly of the activity of the place, albeit the blind Prince does walk about with one priest in front and another behind him, and has everybody pushed out of the way as he passes.'

Though Dr. Rolleston had ceased to practise as a physician, his experience in past days of the life and sufferings of the poor was deeply imprinted in his mind. The sanitary work and improvement of labourers' dwellings which has come to the front as a duty of these modern days, was one chief business of his Oxford life. Showy philanthropy he had no liking for, and he would speak his mind about it plainly enough. Talking of some modern hospitals where much power for healing had been sacrificed for external decoration, he would say—'In such a place the Physician will fondly lead about My Lord Bishop of This and My Lord of That, and show them with much pride an interesting eruption on the hand of a delicate girl, surrounded with every conceivable comfort. I would take them to a house in the slums and show them a boy blown up with dropsy after scarlet fever—no nurse—children sprawling on the floor, and mother up to the elbows in soap-suds washing for her family, who are sickening of the disease and soon to be fresh centres of it—the father out of work or perhaps in gaol. These are the people one wants to help before spending money on Gothic buildings.' It was with these practical ends in view that he sat for years on the Oxford Local Board, working at drainage, water-supply, and sanitary regulation. The difficulty of inducing the classes who suffered most from unhealthy homes and exposure to contagion of course met him at every step. He used often to recall one of his experiences at the time of the [p. liv] Small Pox epidemic in 1871. A poor woman whom he had engaged as laundress in the Small Pox Hospital refused to be re-vaccinated. 'I almost went down on my knees to entreat her,' he said. 'No, she had a drunken husband, her family depended on her work, she could not afford to lie idle if her arm should become swollen and incapacitated after vaccination. So she had her way, caught small-pox, and died.' He used to say that he felt he had the guilt of that woman's death on his soul, for not having insisted on her being re-vaccinated. This outbreak of small-pox in Oxford engaged him in some of his hottest public controversies. News reached him on a journey abroad that some members of the Local Board thought it unnecessary to furnish and occupy the Small Pox Hospital which had been built outside the city on the Woodstock Road. He hurried home to press forward energetic measures to protect life by setting up field-tents and resorting to strict isolation of cases and other sanitary precautions. He used to work in visiting the sick and convalescent, keeping a coat for such visits, that he might not bring home infection. It was at this time that, in answer to his demands for instant action, some one replied that the disease was at present only among the children of the poor. The torrent of rebuke which Rolleston poured on him is not forgotten to this day. Scenes so exciting as this did not often happen, but, as is usual on such Boards, there was many a rough encounter. One of his demonstrators describes him coming home about 5 o'clock one afternoon after a stormy meeting. 'He came into my room and said, "After this meeting I shall take a walk round the Parks. I feel tired." "I thought you enjoyed meetings," said I. "So I do," he replied, "and there was a rampage to-day, and where a rampage is (pointing to himself), there is he." I laughed, and he said, "Yes, I know what you are laughing at—you think where he is, there is a rampage—and you are about right."' Notwithstanding, he began to feel after a while that this strife was wearing him, and taking his time from his classes at the Museum, and he gave up the Local Board.

It seems to have been in 1867 that Rolleston first took a [p. lv] public part in the Temperance movement, at a meeting of the National League held in the Oxford Town Hall. In 1868 he became a Vice-President of the United Kingdom Alliance, and threw his force into the line of the Permissive Bill, in support of which he argued—'If I look out of my window, I see no public-house at every corner of my strip of garden, but I know that many a poor man sees that temptation constantly before him, and many a poor wife as constantly sees that temptation at the bottom of the alley she lives in. I claim for the poor man the same right which Providence has enabled me to purchase for myself.' He felt so strongly that nine-tenths of the misery and vice of England was 'attributable to drink and nothing else,' that at a Temperance Meeting in his own parish of Holywell in 1880, the last meeting he ever went to, when questioned about compensation to publicans he went so far as to answer, 'that if several persons suffered through the ill effects of one man's trade, it was hardly reasonable to expect that compensation would be offered to the few who caused much suffering to fall on the many.’ As to the hygienic question of intoxicating liquors, he approved of abstinence on medical grounds, a favourite example being the wonderful power and endurance he had witnessed among the poorer Turks, 'too poor for drunkenness.' Always a most temperate man himself, he became eventually a total abstainer. His medical reputation gave weight to his speeches, which may be found reported in the Temperance journals, and especially noticed in the sketch of him by Mr. S. Insull. [48]

Among the various letters written by Dr. Rolleston to the 'Times' is one of Sept. 18, 1879, where, on his return from a tour in Scandinavia, he gives the result of his examination of the 'Gothenburg system,’ under which the Municipality itself carries on the public-houses. The letter is too long to insert as a whole, but the following extract is a good example of Rolleston's argumentative humour:—'The information which I obtained in Gothenburg prevents me from denying that since 1876, the year in which the Gothenburg system came into full operation by the final disappearance of the outstanding independent licences, [p. lvi] “drunkenness has decreased wonderfully;" and my informant, whose words I quote, but who, like myself, has seen reason to disbelieve wholly in the "system," professed himself astonished at the change. You may think that my informant and myself are hard to please if we do not think this a success. I have to say that a man must be hard to please and must not be easily satisfied nor contented with first impressions if he is either to get at the real facts or to draw true inferences from them in a matter which is not merely somewhat complex in itself, but which touches hardly on the one side upon powerful pecuniary, and on the other upon powerful philanthropic interests. The first rule, however, in Natural History and, I imagine, in all other sound investigation, is to make yourself acquainted with all the circumstances of the case, and in stating your problem, at least to yourself, to omit from consideration no condition which may in any way be relevant to the question of causation. This rule is a little elementary, but it is also a good deal neglected. Acting upon it, I will remark that the three years in question which have seen the Gothenburg system in full operation, besides being but three years, a sufficiently short time to base even a B.A. degree upon, have been years of severe commercial distress in Gothenburg as in England, with which country the bulk of its trade is carried on. Now we are not here and now so far removed from the memories of the cotton famine as to have forgotten that certain evils, such as that of excessive infant mortality, to say nothing of drunkenness, diminished greatly in England during that period. But nobody ascribed the diminution of that mortality to any other cause than the very obvious vera ac sufficiens causa, which shut up the mills and left the mothers to stay at home and look after their children. And I cannot see why the same line of reasoning may not be applied to the case of Gothenburg, with its three last years of hardship. The analogy is mine, the explanation it suggests to your readers was the one given me by my informant; they can judge for themselves which of the two antecedents has been the more or the really operative one. But Descartes' rule as to an exhaustive [p. lvii] dénombrement of all the circumstances of your case admits of, or rather calls for, more than one additional application in this investigation. When we come to deal with statistics of drunkenness we come to deal in reality with statistics of police-courts, and therein with a set of exceedingly deceptive and not altogether pleasant "personal equations." Now, it has been observed by competent observers, that if part of the fine inflicted after conviction for drunkenness be awarded to the functionary who has brought such offenders to justice, such arrests are more frequent (in Sweden) than they are under a regime which trusts simply to that innate loathing for drunkenness and aversion to disorder which make up the ideal of the genuine policeman. But of late in Gothenburg, as I was informed, the former plan, with its appeals to self-interest, has been laid aside; and a form of night and day blindness, undescribed by oculists, has, as I was also informed, been observed to have fallen upon members of the force. It is right, however, to add that previously those functionaries may have been a little too Draconian in their arrests; and I was told of sailors, and especially of English sailors, who were arrested on charges of drunkenness on no better evidence than that of a hilarity little exceeding that which a Bishop sometimes shows in an after-dinner speech, and of an unsteadiness of gait which the accused avowed was but their ordinary nautical walk.'

Rolleston's advocacy of the Permissive Bill brought him in several ways into contact with practical politics. When Bruce's Act for the early closing of public-houses came into operation it caused much excitement among the publicans, and led to some rioting and smashing the windows of prominent teetotalers. The hostility of the liquor trade to the Liberal Party had much to do with the opposition to Sir W. Vernon-Harcourt's re-election when he vacated his seat on being made Home Secretary in 1880. At any rate Mr. Hall, who then ousted him, was an influential local brewer, and the Daily News attributed the reversal of the former election to 'pot-boy politics,' so that a fair inference may be made as to the motives of Professor [p. lviii] Rolleston and his friend Professor T.H. Green, who were mainly instrumental in obtaining a Parliamentary Commission to enquire into Corrupt Practices in the City of Oxford. This Commission had especially to deal with a class of voters who had brought disgrace on the constituency, which the enquiry resulted in depriving up to the present time of both its Members, by the suspension of the Parliamentary Writ.

In 1872, when it was proposed to establish a Military Centre at Oxford, Professor Rolleston, anticipating from the scheme an increase of distraction and dissipation of student life, took a prominent part in the action of Convocation against it. The Vice-Chancellor was authorised to sign a memorial, and a Delegacy of six persons (of whom Dr. Rolleston was one) was appointed for the purpose of having an interview with the Secretary for War. This opposition, as well as the private influence which Rolleston exerted himself to bring to bear on Members of Parliament, was unavailing, as was another attempt in 1874. That the University should have opposed the establishment of barracks at Oxford is intelligible, but the apprehension proved quite unfounded that undergraduate life would be made more luxurious, or indeed perceptibly affected at all, by the military element.

On a larger matter of politics, Rolleston acted with greater effect, led by the conviction of the hopelessness of Turkish rule, derived (as has been already pointed out) from his Crimean experiences. He mentions this himself in a letter written from Lausanne, Oct. 7, 1877, to Baron de Bogushevski, thanking him for some Slavonic skulls and insisting on their entire distinctness from German skulls. 'I hope you may have noticed that I have been engaged in several Anti-Turk societies in the way of subscribing &c. I was one of the conveners of the St. James's Hall Meeting last autumn, which I rejoiced to see yesterday the official newspaper at Constantinople observed had shown them they would not get help from us. I wish you or any of your countrymen, who must find it hard to understand how the English can sympathise with those wretched Turks, could have seen that [p. lix] meeting in that large hall. It was mainly of educated and more or less reserved men, but they showed an enthusiasm equal to that which a mob might have shown. If Gladstone had only known what he knows now when he was in the plenitude of his power, I believe we should have abolished the vile rule of the Osmanlis some years ago. However, I believe you will do it by yourselves, though we of the really Liberal way of thinking should have been glad to have done our share in company with you. Every day I am expecting to hear you have smashed up one or both of the armies of the savages you are fighting against.'

Both as Professor of Physiology and as a Member of the Medical Council, Dr. Rolleston felt called on to take a leading part in the question of vivisection, or, to put it more accurately, experimentation on living animals. As early as 1863, at the British Association at Newcastle, he had taken up the subject in his Presidential Address to the Biological Section; and in 1871, when presiding over the same Section at Liverpool, he drafted the resolutions of a Conference which led to legislative action. When the Royal Commission was appointed in 1875, he was of course called to give evidence. He stated it as his opinion that for teaching purposes before large classes some few experiments may be useful and expedient, provided invariably that the animal be rendered insensible by anaesthetics and killed before returning to sensibility; it may thus be practically considered as dead, although for physiological purposes it is a living machine. He did not wish to prevent experiments on animals for bona fide scientific purposes, but if causing pain they should not be performed before more than an exceedingly limited number. However, he thought such experimentation very liable to abuse, as likely to tempt a man into carelessness of the sight of suffering, and specially as acting on the emotional nature in a way which he compared to the effect on the spectators of the ancient gladiatorial shows. Considering that the practice required to be specially guarded, he recommended that a register should be kept of all experiments, and that they should only be performed in authorised places open to an inspector. This was the gist of [p. lx] Dr. Rolleston's recommendations, and he also entered into details of the gradual increase of sensibility in the public mind as to the infliction of pain and death, for which those interested should consult the Parliamentary Report itself. Indeed any who for serious purposes desire to examine the conflict of opinion on this subject, will do well to follow it rather in original documents, such as this Blue-Book, than in passages selected for controversial ends. His own conclusion is briefly expressed in a letter where he says, ' A good many scientific men are in the same position as I am. We think restrictions are called for, whilst total abolition is not.' The Vivisection Act of 1876 now in force, and which arose out of the Parliamentary Report, was highly satisfactory to him, as may be judged by the following passage from a letter written at the time: 'I am greatly delighted with Mr. Forster, who has made the Government accept an amendment, which I in my smaller sphere had made the Medical Council accept, whereby frogs are not to be left to the tender mercies of every would-be experimentor. The passing of this Cruelty to Animals Bill is a great step in the history of mankind. There is no country except England and the United States where it could have been passed.' Rolleston's part in this legislation was, however, far greater than is here suggested. Indeed it is obvious to any one who compares the extremely stringent provisions of the Act with the minutes of Dr. Rolleston's evidence, that the new law was in great measure framed on his recommendations, which it follows implicitly.

Such is a brief inventory of work done by Rolleston in his twenty years of professorial life. He did not keep a regular record of the events and interests which diversified his course of labour, and such mentions mostly come up incidentally in letters. Midway in his Oxford career he escaped 'from daily toil and fret' by a return to the East in 1871. He had all the delight of the classically-bred Englishman in steaming round Cape Malea into the Egean [sic], and testing the outlines of the hollow Spartan shore by the well-remembered epithets of Homer and Theokritos. He found the wood-covered hills of Smyrna as he had left them, [p. lxi] and renewed some of his old friendships. He saw Athens, which he had failed to visit in former years, and was angry that historians should have said Greek history was on a small scale, 'as if men were to be counted like pheasants at a battue.' All the classic in him comes out in a characteristic estimate of the surroundings of Athens, 'as much superior to those surrounding most English writers as Aristotle is to --------' (naming a well-known Oxford metaphysician). It was eight years before he made another distant journey, when in 1879 he went with General Pitt-Rivers to Sweden. He was much struck with the manliness of Scandinavian life, the absence of the worst side of poverty, the provisions for public enjoyment, the behaviour of the upper classes contrasting advantageously with England, and the active influence of the Court for good. The object of their visit was to see Museums and Universities, and they were impressed, not indeed with any of these excelling what might be seen at home, so much as by the educational activity among a nation so much less in number and wealth than Great Britain. In a letter written next year to General Pitt-Rivers, Dr. Rolleston comments on 'this cheeseparing Government.' 'I should be in despair if it were not for what we saw done by people of the same flesh and blood as ourselves, but much poorer and less aristocratic, last summer. Recollect what sums are spent, and, as the enclosed cutting from the "Times" of yesterday shows, are going on being spent by democratic Scandinavians for Science.' Among the letters written to General Pitt-Rivers is one of earlier date, taking up the question how far it was well for the Anthropological Institute, when making an effort to increase public knowledge on the then popular subject of Turkey, to go into politics. 'It seems to me that it is well to avoid bringing science into collision or into connexion with moral, social, or political issues more than is inevitable. I always envy mathematicians who have nothing to do with these questions. Of course if you cannot avoid it, you must face it like other disagreeable necessities; but then it is a very difficult thing to balance moral and scientific reasons against each other. In this case I don't see [p. lxii] any necessity for the Institute taking the matter up. It seems to me an entirely political one ....' The extremely important subject, at what stage in the development of science its results may be wisely brought into contact and it may be conflict with political and social opinions, is thus in Rolleston's view to be managed by keeping science and practice apart as long as may be. Whether he was right or wrong, his judgment must be fairly stated and considered, as based on experience. Here, as elsewhere, the writer of these memorial pages feels it no office of his to discuss the positions taken up by Rolleston in science, politics, or religion. His task is only to survey these positions—of their strong and weak points the reader will judge.

It remains to speak briefly of Rolleston's last year of life. Though not even past middle age, he had for years felt the strain of life growing more and more severe. Renal disease set up by excessive toil had morbidly increased his nervous excitability, when the work he still craved for became yet more harmful. The physicians urged him to rest, but this was the very thing he could not do. For instance, during his last Term at Oxford, he rose every morning at six to get two hours free for revising his 'Forms of Animal Life' before the ordinary hard day's work began. Such pressure could not last, and he had to yield to medical advice, and leave England to spend the winter 1880-1 on the shores of the Mediterranean. He went out with Sir William Gull [49] and Dr. Acland to Florence in December, joining his sister, Miss Margaret Rolleston, who was already abroad and could give him the attention he needed for the few months which his family confidently hoped would restore him to health, while Mrs. Rolleston was kept at home by the care of their young children. His starting on this his last journey was sad, for, seeing the future more clearly than those nearest him, he no longer carried with him the expectation of coming back with new vigour to the battle of life. An old pupil came to him at the Museum, and found him very ill but thoughtful as ever for his friends. He said, 'Now is there anything more I can do for you? I shan't be here long to do anything for anybody. [p. lxiii] There's that testimonial I have written for you, and I've put your name down at the Athenaeum.' The present writer saw him in London just starting, full of his old interests, and far less troubled for himself than for his unfinished work. In the hot bright climate of the Riviera his strength revived, and his old capacity for enjoying nature showed itself still strong in him. He went to Nice, and there with Mr. Alfred Tylor [50] examined the human jawbone lately found imbedded in the hill-side, apparently in remote prehistoric times. The description written by him of this jaw was his last scientific paper. [Footnote 2] A few days later he moved to Bordighiera, whence he wrote home to his family a description of the hills clothed with olives to their tops, and the oranges and lemons and 'real date-palms' below. On his way with Mr. George Macdonald [51] to visit Mr. Thomas Hanbury [52] at La Mortola, he pleased himself in picturing how different an aspect the land- scape would have presented to the prehistoric man he had lately been describing—only the hills and pines the same, the now characteristic fruit-trees of the region not yet come from Asia. The tropical vegetation of the gardens of La Mortola raised in his mind a glow of pleasure, expressed in another home letter. A few weeks later, having gone on to Corsica, he writes to one of his sons that he had there found a young General in the Mexican service who could neither read nor write, but who had [p. lxiv] got him a fox's skin and skeleton, and appeared on the whole less of a savage than most of his fellow-islanders. These are trifling details, but they make up the picture of a man still able to hold his own against bodily weakness, still comforted by friendship, and spreading around him the social enjoyment so well remembered by his friends. A graver letter from Corsica shows him under the influence of rest and quiet contemplation among the paradise-vegetation of the island, not yet burnt up by the summer sun, with the sea and the snow-mountains dividing the distant landscape. Here he had come to feel, for the first time in many years, that labour should have its bounds; he quotes George Macdonald's lines:—

'Help me to yield my will in labour even,

Nor toil on toil, greedy of doing, heap,

Fretting I cannot more than me is given.'

He goes on to view his experience of Oxford, in the 'transition from one system to another, from that of Protection of things sacred by artificial enactment, with the usual result of neglect of duty and ignorance, to that of free exposure to open competition in the battle with the unrestrained spirit of modern thought.' The correspondent he is answering had evidently put to him some searching theological questions, to which he replies: ‘It is true that as regards many doctrines, I should, as in the case of the particular one you dwell upon, be slow either to assert myself in definite words, or to condemn other persons for having some one or for not having some one definite set of phrases about any such tenets. Many doctrines are really beyond the power of the human understanding to grasp, and I cannot see my way to making them de fide either for myself or for others. Or to put the matter still more in the concrete, whilst I am on the one hand a member of the Association for the Reform without Disestablishment of the Church of England, I am on the other one of some seven or eight Professors of Science who were to meet at Lambeth to confer privately with the Archbishop last Christmas on the supposed incompatibility of Belief and Science. So, I think, you have the facts as to my [p. lxv] position with reference to the very serious issues of which you write.' Nothing could show more clearly that in these last weeks of his life his mind lay in a cheerful calm. He was of those, to be accounted happy in death, who do not in their last hours painfully shift the moorings they have made fast to in time of health and strength. The temporary revival to which this letter belongs was not to last. On his way back to England increased illness prostrated him, and it was with difficulty that his friends Dr. Child and Mr. Chapman, who went to meet him in Paris, were able to bring him home to Oxford, where his bodily distress, borne with a gentleness and patience which impressed the physicians who watched him, came to its end on June 16, 1881, in his 52nd year.

Dr. Rolleston's face and bearing are well recalled by the portrait in this volume. His picture by Miller [53] hangs in the Common Room of Pembroke College, with an inscription below by his friend Professor Goldwin Smith:—

'Sic indefessum facie spirante vigorem Veri enitebar mente aperire viam Cum vitm et vultds nimio lux victa labors est et vestry abrepta est gloria magna domo.'

A yet more striking memorial is the bust of him by Pinker, [54] presented to the University Museum by Mr. Henry Willett of Brighton, [55] and now placed in the spot which was the centre of his working life, and where for time to come new students will become familiar with the lines of a countenance never to be mistaken for any other man's.

Tylor’s footnotes

Footnote 1. British Barrows: a Record of the Examination of Sepulchral Mounds in various parts of England, by William Greenwell, M.A., F.S.A.; together with Description of Figures of Skulls, General Remarks on Prehistoric Crania, and an Appendix, by George Rolleston, M.D., F.R.S. Oxford (Clarendon Press), 1877.

Footnote 2. At Prof. Turner's suggestion, the following extract is taken from this memorandum, which is too unfinished for printing in extenso. 'These bones . . . were found in digging the cellar of a little country house about a mile out of Nice, about 10 feet down in a deposit of river sand mixed with calcareous matter, in which fresh-water snail shells were found. The bones had been thrown out in spadesful of the deposit, but Mons. Joachim [the proprietor] was clear that they had formed an intrinsic part of the deposit itself. Now this deposit is far above the level of any stream in that locality at present, and it is above the level of terraces very like those now made by the proprietors in this district for olives: and due, like the similar ones at Amiens, to the action of a quaternary pluvial period. So it must have been much older than they, and indeed deposited before the river had become as small and the valley as large by a very great deal as it is now.' The lower jaw in question is very imperfect, the angle is strongly marked for the masseter muscle, mentum feeble, alveolar part of front relatively long, sockets for incisors small; there are 3 molars and 1 pre-molar, very little worn, and Dr. Rolleston judged the jaw to have belonged to a woman nearer 18 than 24. [See here for a note from Rolleston relating to this find, the final letter on this page]

New Notes

All below listed in DNB, add links

[1] Mary Beever (1802-1883) British botanist, provided specimens to other botanists, corresponded with Ruskin. Her letters to him are included in Hortus Inclusus (1887). Her sister Susan was also an amateur botanist.

[2] Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) English clergyman, Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford. Leader of the Oxford movement or Puseyism.

[3] Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) Lawyer, DNB: ‘There are lively observations (Fortnightly Review, 1869) on Robinson's famous breakfast parties by one of the invitees, Walter Bagehot, that bring out the strange mixture of patriarchal and irrepressibly youthful traits in both the company of guests and ‘old Crabb’ himself’. He lived in Russell Square and is associated with the development of University College, London. He was a FSA.

[4] Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) Traveller, archaeologist, politician and diplomat

[5] George Burrows (1801-1887) Physician at Barts.

[6] Alexander William Kinglake, (1809-1891) travel writer and historian

[7] Sidney Herbert, (1810-1861) Secretary of War

[8] John Henry Lefroy, (1817-1890) scientific advisor

[9] Henry Knight Storks, (1817-1890) army officer in charge of British establishments in Turkey

[10] John Meyer (1814-1870) [not in DNB]

[11] Arthur Leared (1822-1879) Became authority on cardiac disease, see http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/2682

[12] Redan, to the south of Malakoff, a salient in fortifications; Malakoff was a site of a major Crimea battle

[13] Lord Panmure, Fox Maule-Ramsay, 11th Earl of Dalhousie (1801-1874), Secretary of State for War.

[14] It was not until 1880 that a French doctor realised that parasites in red blood cells caused malaria and not until 1894 that the role of mosquitos was fully confirmed and understood. See here

[15] See here

[16] See here

[17] Baron de Bogushevski, nothing can be traced

[18] Plevna, actually Pleven in Bulgaria, known for its siege or major battle during the Russo-Turkish war (1877-1878) fought by Russia and Romania against the Ottoman Empire.

[19] Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) British historian and journalist, Regius Professor of Modern History from 1858-1866.

[20] Find a copy of this report here. A ‘blue-book’ was a ‘term often referring to an almanac or other compilation of statistics and information’ [wikipedia]

[21] James Adey Ogle (1792-1857), he had been physician at the Radcliffe Infirmary since 1824.

[22] Francis Jeune or François Jeune (1806-1868) Master of Pembroke College.

[23] Bartholomew Price (1818-1898) Mathematician, Sedleian professor of natural philosophy

[24] Caustic stick, ‘short stick of medication usually containing silver nitrate, used to cauterize skin, for instance for the removal of warts, or moles. They are not used as a treatment for minor cuts. ... The silver nitrate in "caustic pencils" is in a solid form at the tip of a wooden stick, much like a long matchstick. When the silver nitrate is applied to a wound or lesion, it dissolves and can accidentally be spread to other undesirable locations where it can cause skin staining and tissue burns. Should this happen, it should be irrigated with copious amounts of water, or preferably saline solution if immediately available, followed by water. It must be used in careful conditions and those using it should wear eye protection should it be splattered from the nose or tracheostomy stoma of a breathing patient. [from here]

[25] John Ruskin (1819-1900) first Slade Professor of Fine Art see here

[26] Bishop Butler is probably Joseph Butler (1692-1752) see here

[27] James Ussher (1581-1656) Church of Ireland archbishop

[28] Professors Owen and Huxley. Richard Owen (1804-1892), Superintendent of the Natural History department of the British Museum. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) Professor of Natural History at the Royal School of Mines.

[29] Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) Bishop of Oxford

[30] Charles Giles Bridle Daubeny (1795-1867) English chemist, botanist and geologist. Remarks on the Final Causes of the Sexuality of Plants, with particular reference to Mr. Darwin's Work 'On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.' By C.J.B. DAUBENY, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., Professor of Botany in the University of Oxford. [1859]

[31] Louis Pierre Gratiolet (1815-1865) French anatomist and zoologist, see here

[32] Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) wrote an essay entitled, "Speech of Lord Dundreary in Section D, on Friday Last, On the Great Hippocampus Question", a parody of debates about evolutionary theory in the form of a nonsensical speech supposed to have been written by Dundreary. See here and here

[33] John Davy (1790-1868) see here, Humphry Davy (1778-1829) see here

[34] Louis Compton Miall (1842-1921) Geologist and entomologist, he is recording a trip by Rolleston to Bradford where he worked as Secretary of the Philosophical Society, Miall was set to develop the museum and library. See here

[35] Philosophers Robert Burton (1577-1640), Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), and Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682).

[36] William Scovell Savory (1826-1895) Surgeon

[37] Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian active first century BC.

[38] Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844-1891)

[39] John Burdon-Sanderson (1828-1905)

[40] Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917)

[41] William Hatchett Jackson (active 1882-1921) see here

[42] Samuel James Whitmee, London Missionary Society

[43] Canon William Greenwell (1820-1918) archaeologist

[44] John Rhys (1840-1915)

[45] John Evans (1823-1908) Archaeologist

[46] Hermann Schaaffhausen (1816-1893) Professor of Anatomy at Bonn University

[47] Probably Bordighera in Liguria, Italy

[48] Samuel Insull, tradesman and lay preacher active in the Temperance movement

[49] William Withey Gull (1816-1890) Physician

[50] Alfred Tylor (1824-1884) Brother of EB Tylor, Geologist who frequently visited the Continent

[51] George Macdonald (1824-1905) Author and poet

[52] Thomas Hanbury (unknown dates) Quaker philanthropist and lover of plants, La Mortola or Giardini Botanici Hanbury

[53] William Edwards Miller (active 1873-1929) Draughtsman

[54] Henry Richard Hope-Pinker (1849-1927) Sculptor

[55] Henry Willett (1823-1900) Collector and philanthropist

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