on events too fugitive
to be now worth recalling--discusses Homeric points, and while not
surrendering at discretion, admits them worthy of much consideration.
There are many pages from Thirlwall, that great scholar and enlightened
man, upon points of Homeric ethnology, Homeric geography, and such
questions as whether a line in the _Iliad_ (xiv. 321) makes the mother of
Minos to be a Phoenician damsel or the daughter of Phoenix, or whether it is
possible to attach a meaning to {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} that would represent Minos as
beginning his reign when nine years old--a thing, the grave bishop adds,
even more strange than the passion of Dante for Beatrice at the same age.

(M172) Huxley sends him titles of books on the origin of the domestic
horse; Sir Joseph Hooker supplies figures of the girth of giant trees; the
number of annual rings in a fallen stump which would seem to give it 6420
years; tells him how the wood of another was as sound after 380 years as
if just felled. Somebody else interests him in Helmholtz's experiments on
the progression of the vibrations of the true vowel sounds. Letters pass
between him and Darwin (1879) on colours and names for colours. Darwin
suggests the question whether savages have names for shades of colours: "I
should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable, for the
Indians of Chili and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight
promontory and hill to a marvellous degree." Mr. Gladstone proposes to
nominate him a trustee of the British Museum (April 1881), and Darwin
replies, "I would gladly have accepted, had my strength been sufficient
for anything like regular attendance at the meetings." Professor Owen
thanks him for the honour of Knight of the Bath, and expresses his true
sense of the aid and encouragement that he has uniformly received from Mr.
Gladstone throughout the course of the labours from which he is now
retiring.

He corresponds with a learned French statesman, not on the insoluble
Newfoundland problem, turning so much on the nice issue whether a lobster
is a fish, and not on the vexed Egyptian question, but on the curious
prohibition of pork as an article of food--a strange contradiction between
the probable practice of the Phoenic