June 30 + 

Economic 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!⁠ ⁠… 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 starfish’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. + 