This is an autobiographical work by the English writer and biologist Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889-1919). Born and educated in Devon, he began as a reporter, then worked as a biologist in Plymouth and in the entomological department at the Natural History Museum, London. Under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion he wrote his Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919; published shortly before his death), using extracts from his diaries to describe his early passion for natural history and the torture of his later illness, sclerosis. It is one of the great psychological revelations in English autobiography.