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hysterics or at prayers, were all astonished, and many scandalized, at the appearance of Dr. Acland from the saloon in punctilious morning dress, with the announcement that “breakfast was ready.” To the impatient clamour of indignation with which his unsympathetic conduct was greeted, he replied by pointing out that not a boat could go on shore, far less come out from it, in that state of the tide, and that in the meantime, as most of them were wet, all cold, and at the best must be dragged ashore through the surf, if not swim for their lives in it, they would be extremely prudent to begin the day, as usual, with breakfast. The hysterics ceased, the confusion calmed, what wits anybody had became available to them again, and not a life was ultimately lost.

233. In all this playful and proud heroism of his youth, Henry Acland delighted me as a leopard or a falcon would, without in the least affecting my own character by his example. I had been too often adjured and commanded to take care of myself, ever to think of following him over slippery weirs, or accompanying him in pilot boats through white-topped shoal water; but both in art and science he could pull me on, being years aheead of me, yet glad of my sympathy, for, till I came, he was literally alone in the university in caring for either. To Dr. Buckland, geology was only the pleasant occupation of his own merry life. To Henry Acland physiology was an entrusted gospel of which he was the solitary and first preacher to the heathen; and already in his undergraduate’s room in Canterbury he was designing-a few years later in his professional room in Tom quad, he was realizing,-the introduction of physiological study¹ which has made the university what she has now become.

Indeed, the curious point in Acland’s character was its early completeness. Already in these yet boyish days, his judgment was unerring, his aims determined, his powers

¹ [See chapter vi. (“Early Struggles for Science Teaching in Oxford”) of J. B. Atlay’s Memoir of Sir Henry Acland.]

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