376 one marginal aspect of the Stenhouse material has continued to occupy me intermittently since 1961 and is presented here as a series of notes and documents relevant to two of the major scientific debates of last century. Among Stenhouse's younger contemporaries in his student days in Edinburgh was William Rathbone Greg (1809-1881), a noted publicist and essayist of the Victorian period and the father of Sir Walter Greg, whose infant promise'is mentioned with perhaps unwitting prescience in one of the last missives of this elderly parent. 5 A small group of letters written in 1829 can be found in the Stenhouse manuscripts of the Mitchell Library, 6 and it is from this starting point with its glimpses of Greg's involvement in the great Edinburgh debate on phrenology, 7 of his membership of the undergraduate Plinian Society8 and of his enthusiasm for the mechanics' institute movement that I set out on a journey that was to take me to the Kashnor Collection of the National Library of Australia, to the National Library of Scotland, to the Edinburgh University Library, to the British Library and to the Darwin Papers of the University Library, Cambridge. 9 Although the fact seems not to have been noted at the time or recalled in later communications by either man, Greg and Charles Darwin were students and more particularly members of the Plinian Society together. This gives a certain piquancy to the record of their acquaintance in the years following the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871. The confident roles assumed in undergraduate discourse and then, nearly half a century afterwards, in scientific exchange between ostensible equals by two figures whose relative merits have been much more sharply distinguished in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth are gentle reminders of the rapid evolution of the circumstances of intellectual activity. From Edinburgh in 1826-1827 to London and Down in the 1870s is a comparatively small distance, but the Greg-Darwin connection, however fragmentarily it is attested, suggests that it was a world farther removed from our own than the combined span-exactly a century and a half-of the lives of the Gregs father and son might lead us consolingly to imagine. Despite many gaps and unresolved questions of detail, my documents underscore what separates WR Greg's most successful works, Enigmas of Life and The Creed of Christendom, from The Calculus of Variants and A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration.

Apart from John Morley's' WR Greg: a Sketch', 10 which contains tantalizing quotations from early letters apparently no longer available, there is little in print on the early career of Stenhouse's friend. 1 1 The letters preserved in the Mitchell Library have, therefore, a special significance in complementing and confirming what Morley noted about the young man's interest in animal magnetism, phrenology, natural history and education of the workers in the family mills in Cheshire and Lancashire. Greg left Edinburgh and abandoned his formal studies at the end of March 1829. On 24 March a letter of resignation from the office of President was read to a meeting of the Plinian Society: