Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/273

Rh What shall we say of an education or a culture which not only fails to teach a man how to continue his own life, but which is itself the means of destroying it? On this point Clifford's intimate friend, Pollock, writing about him in "The Fortnightly Review," says: "This was the perilous excess in his own frame of nervous energy over constitutional strength and endurance. He was able to call upon himself, with a facility which in the result was fatal, for the expenditure of power in ways and to an extent which only a very strong constitution could have permanently supported; and here the constitution was feeble. He tried experiments on himself when he ought to have been taking precautions. He thought, I believe, that he was really training his body to versatility and disregard of circumstances, and fancied himself to be making investments when he was in fact living on his capital. At Cambridge he would constantly sit up most of the night working or talking. In London it was not very different, and once or twice he wrote the whole night through; and this without any proportionate reduction of his occupations in more usual hours. The paper on ‘The Unseen Universe’ was composed in this way, except a page or two at the beginning, at a single sitting which lasted from a quarter to ten in the evening till nine o'clock the following morning. So, too, was the article on Virchow's address. But Clifford's rashness extended much further than this one particular. He could not be induced, or only with the utmost difficulty, to pay even moderate attention to the cautions and observances which are commonly and aptly described as taking care of one's self. Had he been asked if it was wrong to neglect the conditions of health in one's own person, as well as to approve or tolerate their neglect on a larger scale, he would certainly have answered ‘Yes.’ But to be careful about himself was a thing that never occurred to him."

We append a portion of the estimate of Clifford made in the columns of the "Saturday Review": "The unexpected news of the death of Professor Clifford at Madeira will have brought sadness to an unusallyunusually [sic] large body of devoted friends, who had hoped that his strength had not waned so far that it might not be recovered under the influence of the mild climate to which he had gone. Nor will it be only by those who had the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with Professor Clifford that the news of his untimely death will be deeply felt. Few men who have passed away at so early an age have been so central a figure as he was in the view of a large portion of the most highly educated among us; and still fewer have achieved this distinction, while at the same time they retained the esteem and admiration of the select few who were competent to estimate their powers and know whether they had been put to a worthy use. But it was always his fate to be conspicuous in whatever circumstances or society he was placed. This was primarily due to his intellectual power, for, without the wonderful rapidity and vigor of thought which he possessed, such