Apart from size, tortoises all look very much the same; mostly shell, and an unvarying, somewhat expressionless countenance — when it emerges. However, a recent correspondence in The Times has drawn attention to the range of individuality possessed by these creatures. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley are now famous characters, and the tortoise who nibbles the tennis shoes of visitors; then there is one who thrives on a diet of ground bones, another who has his shell brightened with furniture polish. Some are surly, but many recognize with pleasure their masters and mistresses. Once you know them, almost all betray different characteristics. Antony and Cleopatra in the garden at Blackfriars have quite distinct ways of their own, but watching them this morning it struck me that they have very much in common, after all; that were they just entirely different substances we should never distinguish them from the pansies they have savaged; that, in short, the idea of a tortoise covers them almost as completely as their shell does.

Unconsciously and lazily, I was thinking my way across the ground of the disputes on the nature of universals which occupied the early middle ages; but I was led to reflect that the problem is still very much to the point. If Gerbert and Roscelin thought of it in terms of logical forms, and I was considering it in regard to the realness of tortoiseness, a present and urgent interest applies to the matter of human conduct.