Henry Wellcome

fo'c'sle-study running his naval household with the aid of an Admiralty of natural history suppliers and breeders, as well as experts like Lyell, Hooker and the young Huxley in every port. Beatrice Webb once likened Herbert Spencer to a spider collecting facts on the theoretical web he was spinning; the image equally well suits Darwin. A pleasure to read, this exciting new biography deepens our understanding of Darwin as a geologist, biologist and human being. The sequel, covering Darwin's life of notoriety and fame after 1856, will be awaited with keen anticipation. Henry Wellcome remains something of an enigma, despite this sensitive and painstaking new biography. He probably always will. Robert Rhodes James leaves few avenues unexplored in his researches into Wellcome's life. Successful entrepreneur, pharmaceutical magnate and philanthropist, Wellcome would not, one suspects, be the first choice of a biographer free to pick his own subject. He is not and was not, as Rhodes James notes in his preface, particularly famous. Fame feeds biography, ensuring at the minimum a supply of anecdote and reminiscence to enliven the bare narrative of a life. Furthermore, Wellcome did not put many of his ideas to paper-a fact which Rhodes James considers one of his most intriguing aspects, but which must also have proved one of his most frustrating. Nevertheless, the book presents a much more detailed account than has previously been available of Wellcome's life, beginning with his Minnesota childhood, the diligent years at pharmacy school and the intensely ambitious and successful period of his first positions, particularly with the firm of McKesson and Robbins. They were clearly reluctant to let him go, at the age of twenty-six, to join Silas Burroughs in London. But in the end he left with, in effect, exclusive rights to sell their products in every country bar the United States. The partnership with Burroughs, occasionally strained from the start, became at the end acrimonious and litigious. Those readers who already know something of this saga will find the detailed playing out of the dispute, with many extracts from letters between these two very different men, a fascinating and revealing part of the biography. There is also much to be leamed of that other great acrimonious dispute in Wellcome's life, his ill-fated marriage to Syrie Barnardo. Here however the author is hampered by the general paucity of sources and Wellcome's reticence. This is understandable to some extent, …