The Journal of a Disappointed Man

I thanked him from the bottom of a greedy and grateful heart, and he went on, "I see you describe yourself in your papers as a journalist, but can you tell me exactly what has been your career in Zoology?" I answered of course rather proudly that I had had no career in Zoology. "But what school or college have you worked at?" he persisted. "None," I said a little doggedly. "What I know I have taught myself." "So you've had no training in Zoology at all?" "No, sir." "Well, if you've taught yourself all you know, you've done remarkably well." He still seemed a little incredulous, and when I explained how I got a great many of my marine animals for dissection and study at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, he immediately asked me suspiciously if I had ever worked there. We shook hands, and he wished me all success in the future, to which I to myself devoutly said Amen. Came home very elated at having impressed some one at last. Now for Dublin. June 30. Oeconomic biology may be very useful but I am not interested in it. Give me the pure science. I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies for potato disease nor cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from ever becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government Entomologist![1]... Give me the recluse life of a scholar or investigator, full of leisure, culture, and delicate skill. I would rather know Bergson than be able to stay at the Ritz Hotel. I would rather be able to dissect a star-fish's water-vascular system than know the price of Consols. I should make a most industrious country gentleman with £5,000 a year and a deer park.... My idea is to withdraw from the mobile vulgus and spend laborious days in the library or laboratory. The world is too much with us. I long for the monotony of monastic life! Father Wasmann and the Abbé Spallanzani are the type. Let me set my face towards them. Such lives afford poor material for novelists or dramatists, but so much the better. Hamlet makes fine reading, but I don't want to be Hamlet myself.