Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined as far as I can judge by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been the love of science, unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject, industry in observing and collecting facts, and a fair share of invention as well as of common sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprizing that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points. JOHN BROWN Born in 1810, died in 1882; son of a Biblical scholar of the same name, studied medicine at Edinburgh University and practised medicine successfully in Edinburgh until his death; published the first volume of the "Horae Subsecivae" in 1858, the second in 1861, and the third in 1882; one of these contained his best known work, "Rab and His Friends," frequently printed separately since his death. RAB AND THE GAME CHICKEN[19] Four-and-thirty years ago Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why. [Footnote 19: From "Rab and His Friends."] When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we got up! And is not this boy-nature? and human nature too? and don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage, endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making gain by their pluck. A boy, be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked interest, that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action. Does any curious and finely ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye at a glance announced a dog fight to his brain? He did not, he could not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward to one common focus.