th the sense that all his work had been in vain,
that he was completely out of touch with the age, and that he had best
give up the unequal fight.

In former times when he had found himself beaten in his struggles with
the world, he had turned to geology for a resource and a relief; but
geology, too, was part of the field of battle now. The memories of his
early youth and the bright days of his boyhood came back to him as the
only antidote to the distress and disappointments of his age, and he
strove to forget everything in "bygones"--"Praeterita."

It was Professor Norton who had suggested that he should write his own
life. He had begun to tell the story, bit by bit, in "Fors." On the
journey of 1882 he made a point of revisiting most of the scenes of
youthful work and travel, to revive his impressions; but the meeting
with Miss Alexander gave him new interests, and his return to Oxford put
the autobiography into the background.

Now, at last he collected the scattered notes, and completed his first
volume, which brings the account up to the time of his coming of age. It
is not a connected and systematic biography; it omits many points of
interest, especially the steps of his early successes and mental
development; but it is the brightest conceivable picture of himself and
his surroundings--"scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory," as the
title modestly puts it--told with inimitable ease and graphic power.

We have traced a life which was--even more than might be gathered from
"Praeterita"--a battle with adversities from the beginning. Not to
discuss the influences of heredity, there was over-stimulus in
childhood; intense application to work in youth and middle-age, under
conditions of discouragement, both public and private, which would have
been fatal to many another man; and this, too, not merely hard work, but
work of an intense emotional nature, involving--in his view at
least--wide issues of life and death, in which he was another Jacob
wrestling with the angel in the wilderness, another Savonarola imploring
reconciliation between God and man.

Without a life of singular temperance, without unusual moral principle
and self-command, he would long ago have fallen like other men of genius
of his passionate type. He outlived "consumptive" tendencies in youth;
and the repeated indications of over-strain in later life, up to the
time of his first serious break-down in 1878, had issued in nothing
more than t