But it may be urged that it is not fair to compare a root and a stem which are structurally unlike. Let us, therefore, keep to roots. When the root of a bean has grown vertically down into the soil for some distance it begins to bud forth into side roots. These are exactly like the primary root from which they spring; there is no difference in structure or in machinery of growth. Yet the secondary roots do not grow vertically down, but obliquely, or in some cases horizontally. There is one more striking fact about the roots of the bean. The secondary, like the primary roots, give off branches, and these—the tertiaries—behave differently from both the elder generations of roots. For instead of directing themselves vertically or horizontally, they simply treat the force of gravity with contempt and grow where fancy leads them. The point on which I wish to insist is, that it is impossible to explain on any theory of thedirectaction of gravity why the three orders of roots have three distinct modes of growth. They may remind us of three generations, grandfather, father, and son, all of one blood and yet behaving towards the universe in three distinct ways—a fact not unknown in human society.
On the other hand, it would not be difficult to show that the behaviour of the three orders of roots is well suited to the plant’s needs, and therefore we can understand how the power of reacting in three different ways to the same signal has been evolved. The main root takes the shortest courseto the deeper layers of earth; the four or five ranks of secondary roots divide the world between them and push forth all round, keeping slightly below the horizontal; the tertiaries take it for granted that their predecessors have done the usual thing, and that they can satisfactorily occupy the spaces left among their elders by random growth. The fact that the tertiary roots have no specialised sensitiveness of gravitation shows that their unregulated growth is good enough for the necessities of the case. For among organised beings necessity is the mother of development, and what their brethren of second rank have developed they too could assuredly have gained. To this point of view I shall return, but first I should like to give a few more instances of actions carried out in response to the signal of gravity; and these examples shall be from stem-structures.
The ripe flower-heads of a clover (T. subterraneum) bury themselves in the ground, thus effectually sowing their own seeds, and they are guided to the ground by their unusual capacity of curving down and directing themselves like a primary root towards the centre of the earth.
Other flower-stalks are guided by gravitation for quite different purposes. Take, for instance, a common narcissus. In the young condition there is a straight shaft ending in a pointed flower-bud; but as the flower opens the stalk bends close to the top and brings the flower-tube into a roughly horizontal position, where it shows off its brightly coloured crown to the insects that visit it. The flowers are guided to the right position by thegravitational sense, and they increase or diminish the angular bend in their stalk till the right position is attained, as shown in Fig. 3.
All these cases of plants executing certain useful curvatures, which occur when the plant is displaced as regards the vertical, and cease when the habitual, relation is reached, all these, I say, seem to me only explicable on the theory that gravitation does not act as a mechanical influence, but as a signal which the plant may neglect entirely, or, if it notices, may interpret in any way; that is, it may grow along the indicated line in either direction or across it at any angle. It may be said that this is no explanation at all, that it only amounts to saying that the plant can do as it chooses. I have no objection to this, if the meaning of the word ‘choice’ be defined.
I am now going to deal with the subject of movement from a somewhat different point of view, namely, with the object of showing that it is possible to discover the part of the plant which reads the signal: and this is not necessarily the part that executes the correlated movement. In the reflex movement of an animal (for instance, a cough produced by a crumb going the wrong way), we distinguish the irritation of the throat and the violent action of the muscles of the chest and abdomen; and further, the nervous machinery by which the stimulus is reflected or switched on, by way of the central nervous system, from the throat to the muscles concerned in coughing. In the plant, too, if we are to compare its movements to the reflexes of animals (as has been done by Czapek), we must distinguish a region of percipience, another of motility, and thetransmission of an influence from the percipient to the motor region.
Transmission of a stimulus has long been known inMimosa, but, in the far more important curvatures which we are now considering, it was not known toNarcissus flowersexist before the publication of thePower of Movement in Plants. There is an experiment of Rothert’s[45]which we make in class-work at Cambridge, and which only differs from my father’s classical experiment in the fact that a much more perfectly adapted plant is employed. The plant in question is a grass,Setaria, which has aremarkable form of seedling. When the grain germinates it does not send up a simple cylindrical sprout like an oat, but a delicate stem terminating in a pointed swollen part which looks like a little spear-head. When a group ofSetariasis illuminated from one side they bend strongly over, with their spearheads all pointing straight at the light. The spearheads do not bend; the whole movement is carried out by the stalk on which the head is supported. And what is remarkable is, that the spear-head and not the stalk perceives the light. This is easily proved by covering the heads of a fewSetariaswith opaque caps. For the result is that the blindfolded seedlings remain vertical while their companions are pointing to the light. Thus the part which bends, is unaffected by illumination, and the part whichisaffected does not bend. The spear-head is the percipient organ, the shaft or stalk is the motor region, and from head to shaft an influence has clearly been transmitted.
My father and I made an attempt to prove the same thing for the gravitation-sense of roots, that is, to prove that the tip of the root is the region in which the force of gravity is perceived by the plant. Our method of proof does not hold good, but our conclusions are true after all. When gravitation is the stimulus, the experiment is much more difficult than when light is in question, because now that fairy godmothers are extinct we must not hope for a substance opaque to gravitation, a substance with which we might shelter the root-tips from the force of gravity as the tips of theSetariaseedlings were sheltered from light.
The plan adopted by us was simply to cut off the extreme tip of the roots, and fortunately (or unfortunately) the result was just what was expected—the tipless roots had lost the sense of gravitation, and were unable to curve downwards towards the centre of the earth. It was natural to believe that the tipless roots failed to bend because their sense-organs—their percipient parts—had been removed. As a matter of fact they had been removed, but it was fairly objected that the operation of removing the delicate tissues at the tip of the root is a severe one, and that the roots which refused to grow downwards were suffering from shock, and not from the absence of their sense-organs.
The subsequent history of the inquiry is an instance of the unwisdom of prophesying unless you know. In 1894 an able summary of the question was published in a German journal, in which the impossibility of solving the problem of the gravitational sensitiveness of the root-tip was dwelt on, and immediately afterwards Section K of the British Association had the satisfaction of hearing Pfeffer read a brilliant paper giving the long-hoped-for proof that the tip of the root is a sense-organ for gravitation.[47]
Like many other experiments, it depends on a deception or trick played on the plant. The root is forced to grow into a minute glass tube closed at one end and sharply bent in the middle, resembling a little glass boot; the extreme tip being thuskept at right angles to the main body of the root. If the theory we are testing is the right one, a root with its motor region horizontal and its tip vertical ought to continue to grow horizontally, because the tip being vertical is not stimulated by gravity; it is in a quiescent, or, as it were, a satisfied condition, and no bending influence is being sent to the motor region. And this is what Pfeffer and Czapek found. On the other hand, if the main body of the root points vertically down while the sensitive tip is horizontal, a curvature results, because as long as the tip is horizontal it is stimulated, and the stimulus is transmitted to the motor region.
This experiment proves not only that the tip of the root is the sense-organ for gravity, but also that the motile part is not directly sensitive; in other words, that gravitation is perceived exclusively in the tip of the root. Since the publication of Pfeffer’s and Czapek’s papers I have been lucky enough to hit on another way of investigating percipient organs for gravitation,[48]and I am not without hopes that botanists may become in this question as fertile as Cyrano with his seven ways of flying to the moon.
There is a certain kind of inverted action familiarly known as the tail wagging the dog, and it is on this principle of inversion that my experiment is designed. Inversion may in some cases be practised without altering the final result. For instance, it does not much matter whether the thread goes to the eye (the rational masculineplan) orvice versa, as in the feminine way of threading a needle. In other cases you create what is practically a new machine by inversion, as in a certain apparatus in which the hand of a clock stops still while the clock itself rotates. The effect is still more striking with my plants, for the inversion practised on them entirely changes the character of their movement.
The result may be shown with the seedlingSetariasof which I have spoken, or withSorghum, as in Fig. 4. If one of these is supported by its seed with its stem projecting freely in the horizontal plane, the gravitation stimulus makes it bend upwards until the tip is vertical, when the stimulus ceases to act and the curvature comes to an end. If the conditions are reversed, if the seedling is supported in a horizontal positionby its tip, while the seed projects freely, the result is at first the same, though finally it comes to be strikingly different. The basal end of the seedling is carried upwards by the curvature of the stem; but according to the theory we are testing, the tip of the seedling is the only part of the plant which feels the gravitational stimulus, and the tip of the seedling remains horizontal in spite of the curvature of the stem. Therefore the tip of the seedling is not freed from stimulation as it was in the first case, where the curvature brought the tip into the vertical position. The horizontal tip therefore continues to send commands to the stem to go on curving, in a way I can best explain if I am allowed to make the plant express its sensations in words. The tip says to the stem, “I am horizontal, thereforeyou must bend upwardsâ€; and when this order has been obeyed the tip says, “It is of no use, I am still horizontal—go on bending.â€Â The result is that the stem curls up into a spiral like a corkscrew or a French horn, as shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.—Seedling Sorghums supported by their tips in horizontal glass tubes
These unfortunate plants are in the position of a convict on the treadmill; their movements are, from their own point of view, absolutely ineffectual and meaningless. The results are, however, of some importance from our point of view, since they give clear support to the theory which I have now attempted to place before you, namely, that the percipient region is at the tip of theSetariaseedling, and that by what corresponds to a reflex action, the stimulus perceived by the tip is transmitted to the motor region.
I should like to add a few words on the question how far the movement of plants can be placed underthe general laws deducible from the movements of animals. Unfortunately, as soon as we attack this question we are liable to enter regions where for the ignorant there are many pitfalls. We are, in fact, face to face with the question whether in plants there is anything in which we may recognise the faint beginnings of consciousness, whether plants have the rudiments of desire or of memory, or other qualities generally described as mental.
If we take the wide view of memory which has been set forth by S. Butler[51a]and by Hering, we shall be forced to believe that plants, like all other living things, have a kind of memory. For these writers make memory cover the whole phenomena of life. Inheritance with them is a form of memory, or memory a kind of inheritance. A plant or an animal grows into the form inherited from its ancestors by passing through a series of changes, each change being linked to the preceding stage as the notes of a tune are linked together in the nervous system of one who plays the piano. Or we may compare the development of an animal or plant to the firing of a train of gunpowder, which completes itself by a series of explosions, each leading to a new one. To use the language I have been employing, each stage in development acts as a signal to the next.
In the same way the characteristic element in what is done by memory, or by that “unconscious memoryâ€[51b]known as habit, is the association of achain of thoughts or actions each calling forth the next.
What I wish to insist on is, that the process I have called action-by-signal is of the same type as action-by-association, and therefore allied to habit and memory. The plants alive to-day are the successful ones who have inherited from successful ancestors the power of curving in certain ways, when, by accidental deviations from their normal attitude, some change of pressure is produced in their protoplasm. With the pianist the playing of A has become tied to, entangled or associated with, the playing of B, so that the striking of note A has grown to be a signal to the muscles to strike B. Similarly in the plant, the act of bending has become tied to, entangled or associated with, that change in the protoplasm due to the altered position. There is no mechanical necessity that B should follow A in the tune; the sequence is owing to the path built by habit in the man’s brain. And this is equally true of the plant, in which an hereditary habit has been built up in a brain-like root-tip.
The capacities of plants of which I have spoken have been compared to instincts, and if I prefer to call them reflexes it is because instinct is generally applied to actions with something of an undoubted mental basis. I do not necessarily wish it to be inferred that there can be nothing in plants which may possibly be construed as the germ of consciousness—nothing psychic, to use a convenient term; but it is clearly our duty to explain the facts, if possible, without assuming a psychologicalresemblance between plants and human beings, lest we go astray into anthropomorphism or sentimentality, and sin against the law of parsimony, which forbids us to assume the action of higher causes when lower will suffice.
The problem is clearly one for treatment by evolutionary method—for instance, by applying the principle of continuity.[53a]Man is developed from an ovum, and since man has consciousness it is allowable to suppose that the speck of protoplasm from which he develops has a quality which can grow into consciousness, and, by analogy, that other protoplasmic bodies, for instance those found in plants, have at least the ghosts of similar qualities. But the principle of continuity may be used the other way up; it may be argued that if a lump of protoplasm can perform the essential functions of a living thing, to all appearances without consciousness, the supposed value of consciousness in Man is an illusion. This is the doctrine of animal automatism so brilliantly treated by Huxley.[53b]He is chiefly concerned with the value of consciousness to an organism—a question into which I cannot enter. What concerns us now is, that however we use the doctrine of continuity, it gives support to belief in a psychic element in plants. All I contend for at the moment is, that there is nothing unscientific in classing animals and plants together from a psychological standpoint. For this contention I may quote a well-known psychologist, Dr. James Ward,[53c]who concludes that mind “is always implicated in life.â€Â He remarks, too (ibid.p. 287): “It would be hardly going too far to say that Aristotle’s conception of a plant-soul . . . is tenable even to-day, at least as tenable as any such notion can be at a time when souls are out of fashion.â€
This is a path of inquiry I am quite incapable of pursuing. It would be safer for me to rest contented with asserting that plants are vegetable automata, as some philosophers are content to make an automaton of Man. But I am not satisfied with this resting-place. And I hope that other biologists will not be satisfied with a point of view in which consciousness is no more than a bye-product of automatic action, and that they will in time gain a definite conception of the value of consciousness in the economy of living organisms. Nor can I doubt that the facts discussed in these pages must contribute to the foundation of this wider psychological outlook.
Early in May I walked up from the valley to the extreme rim of the Cotswolds, just above our house. The lower country is all pasture, where we can wander at will, and delight in the many beautiful trees: the fresh green elms, the vernal yellow of the oak (which lingers in varying degrees behind some of its companions, but does not deserve Tolstoy’s epithet ‘maussade’), and the grey anatomy of the timid ash, whose black buds are still getting up their courage. We do not owe the trees in the meadows to landowners with a taste for natural beauty, but to the cattle that must have shade.
The buttercups are beginning their golden show, and there is not much else to decorate the fields, except daisies and the cheerful dandelions. These last are still growing obliquely, and not yet staring boldly up at the sky, as in later life. There is also an occasional patch of bugle—sturdy little blue sentinels, and a few purple orchids. In the upper meadows where the wind is cold the daisies bend their stalk and lay their heads on the ground (as they do at night), and their little noses look red like poor Marian’s in Shakespeare’s winter song. Inthe daisy it is the pink-tipped petals[56]huddling together that make this chilly symbol a contrast to the happy star that sunshine shows.
Near the top of the hill is a bare pasture covered with cowslips, all pointing their pretty heads one way. At first it seemed that they were simply yielding to the fresh wind, but on picking them it was made clear that they bent their stalks wilfully, not on compulsion. On the whole it seemed that they were nodding towards the brighter light, but I could not perceive that the quarter to which they turned had any advantage in luminosity.
Close to the top of the hill is a little wood of nut-trees, and I looked down into it over the hedge with a shock of pleasure at the chequer-work of white and blue, a conspiracy of wild garlick and blue-bells. In this land I have not seen the blue haze covering acres of cleared woodland such as we have in Kent. But this colour-dance of the two plants is beautiful in its own way. Now we have reached the rim of the valley, and look over into a new country, with many red patches of ploughed land, and sheep in the treeless fields instead of cattle. Here the skylark sings, who is something of a stranger to us dwellers in the valley. The same is true of the yellow-hammer, whose hot and dusty voice is less familiar there. To one inland bred the seagulls feeding in the ploughed lands are a delight. They seem an echo from the salt sea, or a variation (in a musical sense) on the far away silverstrip which is the Severn shining down to the Bristol Channel.
We now come to a little wandering road, called for reasons unknown to me Seven Leases Lane, and after a time end our wanderings at a point whence we can look down on misty Gloucester and its cathedral; and this is a historic spot if the rumour is to be trusted, that from here King Charles watched the siege. The lane is pleasant with its plashed hedges beset with traveller’s joy (clematis) and bryony. Clematis likes to climb up trees, but it seems quite happy ramping over the hedges. It is now in its freshest youth, and the careless way in which the young stems toss themselves hither and thither gives an impression of endless living things dancing with complete abandon on the hedge as on an airy floor. The traveller’s joy climbs by seizing hold of the branches of plants more solid than itself. It grips them with its leaf-stalks, which serve as tendrils and support the weakling stem aloft in the clear air. But as yet they have hardly begun to fix themselves; though some I saw which had caught each other, giving themselves a gay aspect by seeming to dance hand in hand.
The white bryony is there also, and its tendrils have fastened on to the hazel, beech and dog-wood, which make up the mass of the hedge. Their tendrils are but delicate ropes, and when they have seized a twig they would break away in the first fresh breeze. But this is prevented by the fact that the tendrils contract into spiral springs, and by the give-and-take of its elastic coils the cablebecomes almost unbreakable and the ship rides out the stiffest gale.[58a]
Two other types of climbing plants are common in our lane, which have neither the grasping leafstalks of clematis nor the delicate tendrils of white bryony. Black bryony is a twining plant, and can travel spirally up the hazel stems, just as a hop ascends its pole. But here in our lane there is but little to climb up, and its livid pink stems, often twisted with one or more brother-strands, lie along the hedge or sway in the air like discontented snakes. Just now they hardly show any leaves, but later in the spring they will have finely polished ones, and later still bunches of red berries, which do not seem to be popular with birds, and hang on their branches till winter comes. Another type of climber which shows itself early is the goose-grass.[58b]This is a humble personage, probably looked down on by the superior climbers above described, as able neither to swarm spirally nor to ascend by the aid of tendrils or other gripping apparatus. The goose-grass depends on the possession of delicate little hooks covering stem and leaves. These can be perceived by stroking the plant from the base upwards, but not in the other direction. The hooks being directed downwards do not hinder the upward push of the growing plant, but they prevent it from slipping downwards. If one disentangles a goose-grass from its position it will fall weakly over and lie along the ground. In itssimple way it gains the object aspired to by all climbers, namely the possession of a satisfactory position in the world without going to the expense of building a stem stiff enough to stand alone. To children goose-grass is valuable as the ideal material for the making of sham birds’ nests, since the hooked prickles hold the stems in position and make the art of nest-building a singularly easy one.
The great revolution that breaks out in the spring, when the store-houses of the plant pour nutriment into the numberless awakening buds is a miracle annually repeated in the endless procession of life. We know something of the mechanism by which mobilisation is effected. We know for instance that the starch-grains guarded by the dormant plant during the idle days of winter are liquified, or rather, that the starch is converted into sugar, and being soluble in water can flow from the magazines of the plant to where growth, implying the creation of millions of newly born cells, demands material. We are gradually learning to understand something of that seething cauldron of life which we can dimly watch in living things. The ferment diastase is one of the tools with which plants perform their miracles of chemical activity. This diastase and its brother-ferments have qualities resembling those of living creatures. They may, like seeds, be dried and kept in a bottle until they are awakened by giving them water. Perhaps this is talking in a circle, and that ferments only resemble living things because organisms contain so many of these mysterious bodies. I like to fancy that there issomething more than this, and that a ferment is an automaton which the plant compels to labour for it—a Frankenstein monster having semi-living qualities, being no more than a parody of life. But I am getting beyond the questions that are in tune with a spring day.
The most obvious characteristic of English country life as described by Jane Austen, is a quietness such as even the elder generation now living have not experienced. A quietness which many would call dull and some few peaceful. It is, indeed, hard to believe that life was once so placid, so stay-at-home, so domestic, so devoid, not merely of excitement, but of any change whatever.
The life of Emma Woodhouse (to take a single instance) has all the characteristics of this deep repose. At Hartfield there was certainly no changing “from the blue chamber to the green,†a revolution which would have made Mr. Woodhouse seriously unwell.
Emma never seems to leave home, she had not seen the sea, nor indeed had she (before a memorable occasion) explored Box Hill, a few miles away, although her father kept a carriage and a pair of horses. Nor is there any evidence of her going to London, a distance of sixteen miles. She did not engage in good works; there were no committees or meetings except those held at the ‘Crown’ at which Mr. Knightly and Mrs. Elton’scara sposowere the leaders, and where no ladies were admitted.
In comparison with the hurried unsheltered life of the modern girl, Emma seems a princess shut in a tower of brass or an enchanted garden. And although in the course of the story she escapes this particular tower, it is only to fall into the castle of Mr. Knightly, who (with his squire William Larkins) plays the part of knight errant.
And Emma was not dull, but full of happy animation, and her quiet life encouraged the growth of an educated, or at least a cultivated, condition which re-appears in the other novels. This placid life is all the more striking in contrast to the great contemporary struggle of the Napoleonic wars, hardly a sound of which reaches Miss Austen’s readers, although inPersuasionwe do hear something of Captain Wentworth’s prize money. George Eliot knew the flavour of this quietude, and reproduces it in the introduction toFelix Holt. But even in these pre-reform days the quiet is beginning to be broken; the stage-coachman is beginning to dread the railway train, and looks on Mr. Huskisson’s death as a proof of God’s anger against Stephenson. Again, inMiddlemarchwe see the country stirring in its sleep, and poor Dorothea suffering in the process of awakening. There is nothing of this in Miss Austen; it is true that the Miss Bennets sometimes experienced the blankness of female existence, but they could imagine nothing blanker than the departure of the militia from Meryton.
Jane Austen’s books have something of the quiet atmosphere of Cowper’sLetters. Mr. Austen Leigh in hisMemoirspeaks of her love for thewritings of Cowper and of Crabbe (the latter indeed she proposed to herself to marry). We know that Marianne Dashwood (that type of sensibility) was very far from finding Cowper too quiet. For when Edward Ferrars failed to read him aloud with spirit, Marianne remarks, “Nay, mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!â€
Bagehot[63a]in his article on theLetters of Cowperunconsciously describes the life at Hartfield or Mansfield Park. Of Cowper he writes: “Detail was his forte and quietness his element. Accordingly his delicate humour plays over perhaps a million letters mostly descriptive of events which no one else would have thought worth narrating, and yet which, when narrated, show to us, and will show to persons to whom it will be yet more strange, the familiar, placid, easy, ruminating, provincial existence of our great grandfathers.â€
The domestic and intimate parts of life are the most lastingly happy, and thus it is that an imaginary existence, which in some moods seems to be unbearably humdrum, harmonises with the best parts of our own life. The quiet winds that blow through Miss Austen’s imagined land cannot turn windmills or overset tall trees, but they can set going those tunelike chains of simple experiences written on our memories by the quiet and happy parts of life.
Imaginative writing is often compared to painting, and Miss Austen has spoken[63b]of “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I workwith so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.â€Â But this gives a false impression, suggesting a niggling character from which her work is free. What strikes one is rather how much she conveys by touches which seem trifling until we realise the triumph of the result. The effect is not a miniature, as the author suspects, but something essentially broad in spite of its detail, like a picture by Jan Steen.
To discuss why Jane Austen’s humour is admirable, or how she reaches such perfection in the drawing of character, seems to me as hopeless as to ask by what means Bach or Beethoven wrote such divinely beautiful tunes. Her powers are rendered even more admirable by the fact[64a]that she did not draw portraits, so that no one could sayAis Mr. Collins andBis Mrs. Palmer.
I think it is true, but not easily explained, that the simplest people in her books give us most pleasure. Why is Admiral Croft so delightful, and why do we read again and again the speech about his wife, who suffered from sharing the exercise prescribed for her husband’s gout? “She, poor soul, is tied by the leg with a blister on one of her heels as big as a three-shilling piece.â€Â Why do we delight in Mr. Woodhouse’s perambulation among his guests, and his words to Jane Fairfax, “My dear, did you change your stockings?â€Â In this respect we have advanced beyond theQuarterlyreviewer of 1815,[64b]who says: “The faults of these works arisefrom the minute detail which the author’s plan comprehends. Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward, or too long dwelt on, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society.â€Â If ever a reviewer “damned himself to everlasting fame,†surely this writer did so; but, indeed, we need not have quoted so much, since (in the words of Corporal Trim) “he is damned already†for leaving out the ‘Mr.’ before the name Woodhouse.
But six years later (1821) anotherQuarterlyreviewer (said to be Archbishop Whately) reversed the above unfortunate judgment by singling out the drawing of Miss Austen’s fools as shining examples of her skill.
Jane Austen must surely be the most re-read author of the last hundred years. Lord Holland is said to have read her books when he had the gout, and in that case he must have experienced what smaller people have suffered during less picturesque complaints, viz., from not being able to determine which of her books they have most nearly forgotten. In this frame of mind one longs for a new Miss Austen more than for a new symphony of Beethoven, or a play of Shakespeare, and much more than for the lost books of Livy, which, indeed, I, for one, do not desire at all.
The power of endlessly re-reading the novels of Miss Austen is the only advantage conferred by a bad memory. I do not imagine that Macaulay, greatly as he admired her, could have endured toread her as often as I have. Nor am I willing to allow that this is intellectual idleness, for her works like those of Nature, always yield something new to the faithful student.
And she, like Nature, has the power of creating in her devotees a minute interest which I rarely experience in other writers. It does not seem to Austenites a foolish thing to inquire what was Mr. Woodhouse’s Christian name, a problem only soluble by remembering that he thought it “very pretty†of poor Isabella to call her eldest little boy Henry, and by implication proving that the child, who should have been christened John after his father, was named after his grandfather. And I am proud to remember that when the problem of Mr. Woodhouse’s name was propounded to my mother, she solved it at once, and as though it were a question too simple to be asked. Nor does it seem to us trivial that the word given by Frank Churchill to Jane during the “word-game†at Hartfield was ‘Pardon.’ This was traditionally known in the author’s family, indeed Mr. Austen Leigh[66]says that she was always ready to reveal such valuable facts as that Mrs. Norris’ “considerable sum†given as a present to William inMansfield Parkwas one pound; that Miss Steele never caught the Doctor, and that Mary Bennet married an unfortunate clerk of her uncle Philip’s. These revelations lend an air of history to her romance, they give the exciting quality of treasure-trove to the secrets she shares with us. “Andhere,†as children’s books say, “a very pretty game may be played by each child saying†what question he would put to the ghost of Jane Austen. For myself I believe I should ask, “Would Fanny Price really have married Crawford if he had not eloped with Miss Bertram?â€Â If in the words of Captain Price there had not been “the devil to pay†in Wimpole Street. Then, too, I should have liked some eugenic information about Elizabeth’s (Mrs. Darcy’s) children. Because if there was reversion to the type of Lydia it would have been serious. One can fancy Elizabeth retorting that if he said another word about the Lydia type she would pray for an infant possessing all the qualities of Lady Catherine de Burgh, a gift well within the powers of the gods who rule heredity.
I doubt whether Jane Austen consciously painted the results of heredity; rather, I suppose that her memory working instinctively, made, for instance, the Bennet family consist of types recalling the father or mother. She could hardly have known of the questionable theory that the eldest child is commonly inferior to the second, and nevertheless she makes Jane Bennet inferior in capacity to Elizabeth, although so greatly superior to the younger children of Mrs. Bennet’s type.
There are other cases of heredity among her characters; for instance, inPersuasion, the snobbery and selfishness of Miss Elliott clearly reproduces her father, while Anne, as we know from Lady Russell, was a true child of her mother. I like to fancy that the querulousness and weakness of Mary (Mrs. Charles) was a perverted gentleness coming fromher mother, while her vulgarity came from Sir Walter. Then again, Emma had none of Mr. Woodhouse’s qualities, and we must suppose her to be a repetition of her mother. Unless, indeed, her general kindliness came from her father, and possibly also the stupidity which wrecked her matrimonial agency. We must, I think, believe that Mrs. Woodhouse had been a managing woman, who probably insisted on Mr. Woodhouse marrying her; thus her instinct for matrimonial scheming was confined (we may fancy) to her own interests. It is too fanciful to suggest that Mrs. Woodhouse had a tinge of hardness in her which came out in Emma’s celebrated rudeness to Miss Bates. At any rate, it is certain that it was not a heritage from her father. I knew a lady who could never forgive this slip of poor Emma. And the vividness of this feeling was not a symptom of that want of literary sense which makes the gallery hiss the villain on the stage, but must be taken as a proof of the vitality of the character. Isabella Woodhouse is obviously of her father’s type, with hardly a mental feature to remind us of Emma.
In the Bertram family the inheritance is not very clear; the Miss Bertrams seem to show the hard narrowness of Mrs. Norris, and none of the sheep-like good nature and futility of Lady Bertram. I suspect that in Mrs. Norris, hardness and business tendency were an inheritance from her uncle, the Huntingdon solicitor, for we know that he made the harsh and commercial statement that his niece was at least £3000 short of any equitable claim to the hand of Sir Thomas. We do not knowanything of the parents of Lady Bertram, but we may suspect that her Ladyship inherited from her mother the soft and cushiony character of which she is a great example. Mrs. Price, with her small income and large family, was unfortunately of the same easy and futile temper. Edward Bertram is obviously his father the Baronet over again, with all his kindness and extreme respectability, while what will ultimately grow into Sir Thomas’ pomposity is like the delicate tissues of the sucking pig in Charles Lamb’s essay, not to be described by the gross terms applicable to the adult, “Oh, call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it,†etc. The elder brother, Tom, who began life as a cheerful, irresponsible person, falls under the family curse in consequence of a mysterious fever, so that he doubtless inherited the fatal tendency from Sir Thomas, together with a certain insouciance and want of heart, which one can imagine to be forms of Lady Bertram’s emptiness and Mrs. Norris’s hardness.
This is a subject on which a Mendelian inquirer might endlessly speculate, but the characters in fiction being even less susceptible to experiment than our living friends and acquaintance, the interest of the matter is soon exhausted.
It is to be regretted that Miss Austen did not allow the characters of one novel to appear in the next. It is true that this would have upset plots in an absurd way, but I should like to know what would have happened if, when Henry Tilney had made up his mind that he was in love with Catherine, Elizabeth Bennet had appeared? He wouldsurely have repented of his entanglement with Catherine. There is, however, this to be said, that I strongly suspect Elizabeth of being his first cousin. She is so like him that she might have failed to please him, or he may have known her from a little girl and looked on her as a sister. Or the marriages of cousins may have been as impossible among the Tilneys as in the Royal Family of Crim Tartary, where Bulbo’s beautiful Circassian cousin simply had to be allowed to die of love for him.
There are many possibilities in the combination of characters now separated by inexorable paper and ink. One can imagine a meeting at Bath between General Tilney and Sir Walter Elliott; they would clearly sympathise, and unless the General has injured his complexion by incautious zeal on active service, which seems unlikely, Sir Walter would have had “no objection to being seen with him anywhereâ€; he might even have walked arm-in-arm with him as he did with Colonel Wallis, who “was a fine military figure, though sandy haired.â€Â Again, Mr. Collins would have been charmed with Mr. Dashwood inSense and Sensibility, for although the two characters are not quite similarly compounded of snobbery and folly, yet there is a common substratum of meanness that must have served as a bond.
It would be interesting to treat the whole of Miss Austen’s characters as the flora of a given land is dealt with, to divide them into genera and species, and to provide an analytical key. Take, for instance, the young men: these wouldcorrespond to a Natural Order, say the Ranunculaceae, and may be divided, as the following table shows, into two groups, Attractive and Unattractive, and these are subdivided again into four groups which correspond to genera. No. 1, which we should call Brandonia, possesses the three speciesBrandonia brandoni,ferrarsi, andbertrami, and so on with the rest.
Table of characters
Brandon, Dashwood, Ferrars, R. Ferrars, Willoughby are inSense and Sensibility; E. Bertram, Crawford, Rushworth inMansfield Park;Mr. Collins, Darcy, Wickham inPride and Prejudice; Tilney and Thorpe inNorthanger Abbey; Mr. Elton, F. Churchill and Knightley inEmma; Wentworth and Mr. Elliot inPersuasion.
Then of course we should need descriptions to distinguish the species, thus in genus (ii) Darcy would be known by pride, Knightley by calm sense, Tilney by light-hearted cheerfulness, while Wentworth would be easily recognised by his sub-dull character. Naturalists would dispute whether Mr. Elton should be in the same genus as Wickham, or in the quite distinct genus (iv); or again, whether F. Churchill should not be placed with Darcy and Knightley. In the same way Captain Wentworth might perhaps be placed in the dull group with Brandon, Edward Ferrars and Edward Bertram.
I have not attempted to include in the system all the young men who occur in the novels. I leave the completion to those who can devote a life-time to the subject, and who are possessed of the necessary discrimination and patience to marshall and arrange the whole flora of Miss Austen’s world.
In connexion with this subject I have found it interesting to read for the first time quite recently Miss Austen’s unfinished novels,Lady SusanandThe Watsons. It is easy to classify some of the characters—thus Mrs. Robert Watson is obviously Mrs. Elton, as, indeed, Mr. Austen Leigh points out in hisMemoir.
In the following scene the character addressed as Jane is Mrs. Robert Watson, who has come to stay at the house of Mr. Watson, her father-in-law.Elizabeth is the eldest of the Watson girls, and keeps house for her father. “I hope you will find things tolerably comfortable, Jane,†said Elizabeth, as she opened the door of the spare bed-chamber.[73]
“My good creature,†replied Jane, “use no ceremony with me, I entreat you. I am one of those who always take things as they find them. I hope I can put up with a small apartment for two or three nights without making a piece of work. I always wish to be treated quiteen famillewhen I come to see you. And now I do hope you have not been getting a great dinner for us. Remember we never eat suppers.â€Â And then: “Mrs. Robert, exactly as smart as she had been at her own party, came in with apologies for her dress. ‘I would not make you wait,’ said she, ‘so I put on the first thing I met with. I am afraid I am a sad figure. My dear Mr. W. (addressing her husband) you have not put any fresh powder in your hair.’â€
This is certainly Mrs. Elton’s double, and the resemblance extends to calling her husband Mr. W. It gives one a certain shock of surprise to find an old friend masquerading as a new acquaintance, nor is she the only example in the book. I think the following speech of Mr. Tom Musgrave will recall a well-known character.
“Oh, me,†said Tom, “whatever you decide on will be a favourite with me. I have had some pleasant hours at ‘speculation’ in my time, but I have not been in the way of it for a long while. ‘Vingt-un’is the game at Osborne Castle.[74a]I have played nothing but ‘Vingt-un’ of late. You would be astonished to hear the noise we make there—the fine old lofty drawing-room rings again. Lady Osborne sometimes declares she cannot hear herself speak. Lord Osborne enjoys it famously, and he makes the best dealer without exception that I ever beheld—such quickness and spirit, he lets nobody dream over their cards. I wish you could see him over-draw himself on both his own cards. It is worth anything in the world!â€
We may surely recognise the folly and underbred parade of Mr. John Thorpe in Mr. Tom Musgrave’s speech. Again, Tom Musgrave plagues Emma just as Thorpe persecuted Catherine by an ill-timed invitation to atête-a-têtecurricle drive.
The heroine, Emma Watson, has no resemblance to Emma Woodhouse. In situation she may be compared to Fanny Price, for she has been brought up by a refined aunt, and is suddenly plunged into the very different manners and surroundings of her pushing jealous sisters; but in character she seems to me to have none of the charm which has given Fanny Price such various admirers as the Rev. Sydney Smith and Mr. F. W. H. Myers.[74b]It is perhaps characteristic of her creator’s truth, that her heroine who is made known to us just as she arrives at her new home in uncomfortablesurroundings and among unknown sisters, should be reserved and a little prim, and that we should be made to feel that this was not her complete character. Possibly she would have developed into a Fanny Price with a strong touch of Eleanor Dashwood, but this is a barren speculation.
Another unfinished novel was begun in January, 1817, and twelve chapters were written by the middle of March. Miss Austen died on July 18 of that same year. This unnamed novel, to judge by extracts published in theMemoir(p. 181), promised to contain at least one admirable character in the person of Lady Denham, who seems an ill-natured and grasping Mrs. Jennings (if that is not a contradiction in terms), with a strong flavour of Lady Catherine de Burgh.
Miss Austen’s works are not only to be studied from the point of view of genetics, nor merely by a naturalist whose desire is to classify without inquiry as to the origin of his species; they also supply material for the geographer. I do not know who first identified the Highbury ofEmmawith Cobham, as being seven miles from Boxhill and 18 from London (“sixteen miles, nay 18, it must be full 18 to Manchester Streetâ€). The identification is confirmed by a slip on the part of the authoress, who, in a single passage, printed Cobham in place of Highbury. By this method of mensuration my friend the Master of Downing has shown Kellynch Hall inPersuasionto be near Buckland St. Mary, and Mansfield Park to coincide roughly with Easton, near Huntingdon.
The geography of Lyme Regis is of interest.
The party from Upper Cross drove in a leisurely way to Lyme, and the afternoon was well advanced as they descended the steep hill into the village. The hill is doubtless much as it was, and nearly at the bottom are the two hotels mentioned; it is, honestly speaking, impossible to say at which of the two the Musgroves put up. I am inclined to believe it was that on the west side, but my reasons, if indeed they exist, are not worth giving.
The house in which Miss Austen is known to have stayed is probably Captain Harville’s. It is near the Cobb, and presents that air of not having much room inside, which we gather from the description inMansfield Park.
But these points are of trifling interest in comparison with the really important question—where did Louisa’s accident occur? There are three separate flights of steps on the Cobb, and the local photographer, in the interests of trade, had to fix on one of them as the scene of the jump. I cannot believe that he is right. These steps are too high and too threatening for a girl of that period to choose with such a purpose, even for Louisa, whose determination of character we know to have been one of her charms. Then, again, this particular flight is not (so far as I could make out) in the New Cobb, which is where the accident is described as occurring. It is true that at first sight it hardly looks dangerous enough to bring about the sight which delighted the fishermen of Lyme, namely, a “dead young lady,†or rather two, for the sensitive Mary contributed to the situation by fainting. I am, however, confirmed in my beliefby what happened to myself, when I went to view the classic spot. I quite suddenly and inexplicably fell down. The same thing happened to a friend on the same spot, and we concluded that in the surprisingly slippery character of the surface lies the explanation of the accident. It had never seemed comprehensible that an active and capable man should miss so easy a catch as that provided by Louisa. But if Captain Wentworth slipped and fell as she jumped, she would come down with him.
I am told that when Tennyson visited Lyme he repelled the proposals of his friends, who wished him to see something of the beauties of the place, and insisted on going straight to the flight of steps. This is an attractive trait in Tennyson’s character, but it may not have been pleasing to his hosts.
An Address to the Association of UniversityWomen Teachers, January 13, 1911
In the following pages I propose to give my own experience of education, that is to say, not of educating others, but of being educated. It seems to me that the education of one’s youth becomes clear to one in middle life and old age; and that what one sees in this retrospect may be worth some rough record and some sort of criticism. One may, of course, be mistaken about what was bad and what was good in one’s training. But the experience of the pupil is, at the least, one aspect of the question. And I think that the memories of how we were taught is something much more definite and vivid, something that can be more easily made interesting to one’s readers, than the generalised experience gained as a teacher.
Any record of education which extends fifty years back has a certain value, and my experience may serve as a stepping-stone to that of my father, of which we fortunately have an account in his own words, and these take us back to a period more than one hundred years ago.
Those of us who are inclined to despair over education as an inherent misfortune of youth, maybe encouraged by this putting down of milestones, and may almost believe that we have moved in the right direction. Whereas, to those optimists who are cheerfully and unhesitatingly educating their allotted prey of children, it may be as salutary, as a cautionary story, to realise that the same optimism ruled one hundred years ago, when the Eton latin grammar was a symbol to innumerable complacent schoolmasters of what was best in the best of all possible worlds. But the chief part of what I have to say is autobiographical, and I have only an occasional remark to make on the progress and improvement that have occurred in education.
My ignorance of educational methods may probably lead me to repeat what is well known; because what seems to me bad in my training has doubtless been recognised as such by modern teachers, nor can I hope to have anything very new to say about what seems to me to have been good.
As children, we, my brothers and sisters, were treated by our parents in a way the very reverse of the pitiless 18th and early 19th century manner—the spirit of those surprising stories such as thePurple Jar, where the child is deceived by her abominable parent. In fact, a chief characteristic of our parents’ treatment of us was their respect for our liberty and our personality. We were made to feel that we were “creatures whose opinions and thoughts were valuable to them.â€
The happy relations with our elders which we enjoyed in the holidays to some extent counteracted the evil effects of going to school. The worst of a boarding-school is that it is a republicof children, where the citizens are saturated in the traditions and conventions peculiar to themselves, and are, for more than half their lives, deprived of the saner ideals of grown-up people. Before we went to school we were taught by governesses. I cannot help wishing that we had had foreign teachers who would have taught us to speak their language—a thing that can be done so easily in childhood. I have never got over the want of fluent French and German, and I resent the fact that I should be condemned to feel like a child or a boor in the presence of foreigners. We are taught Latin and Greek because, as we are assured, they introduce us to the finest literature in the world. To most boys they do nothing of the kind, and are an intolerable burden. French and German taught by the oral methods really do introduce us to whole nations of minds that are otherwise cut off from us; and not merely minds mirrored in books, but more especially those of human beings as given in speech.
This is all very familiar, I only mention it because it is a special case of a wider question, namely: How much can be safely poured into a receptive child which he will be thankful for as he gets older? I mean, rather: What is the proportion that ought to be maintained between learning to reason,e.g., Euclid; exercising the attentive faculties,e.g., in plodding through a Latin book with a dictionary; and the more or less mechanical acquirement, as in learning by heart? Why was I not taught addition by memorising tables as in the case of multiplication? It couldhave been built into the structure of my mind equally well, and would have saved much misery. It is, of course, essential that what is learned should be true. I have heard a credibly attested story of a dame-school at the beginning of last century, where class and teacher were heard chanting together: Twice 1 is 2, twice 2 is 3, twice 3 is 4, etc.
I certainly believe in learning by heart, and I am grateful for having learned many dates at school; most of them are forgotten, but enough to be of some use are retained. The worst of it is that I am as likely to know the date of the Flood as that of the Fire of London, and of the battle of Arbela as that of Worcester.
I am also grateful for having been made to learn Shakespeare by heart, although we had to do it before breakfast. I do not imagine that I now remember any of it, but it gave me some idea of the beauty of literature, which I hardly gained at all from the classics. It also started me reading Shakespeare out of school. I believe this is the easiest way of supplying some modicum of literature to a boy who cannot get it out of Latin and Greek. And a kind of Cowper-Temple Shakespeare, without note or comment, is more effective than regular so-called literary lessons, and the worrying of boys about the metre or the difference between a hawk and a handsaw. A boy does not want to understand everything, and he likes to get his poetry in a book which looks as if it were meant for reading, not for cramming or for holiday tasks.
Personally, I also resent that I was not taught at school to read music by the sol-fa system, which is another of the things that can be poured into most children not only easily but with pleasure to themselves. I have been assured by a learned musician, that in the 17th century reading music was as much a sign of culture as reading a book. There was recently an excellent letter in theTimes[82]on public school music, pleading that boys should be allowed to drop, let us say greek iambics, and devote the time to serious musical study. The writer describes how at a certain school a good professional orchestra gives a concert once in each term, for which the boys are prepared by having the themes of the movements,e.g.of a Beethoven symphony, played over to them on the piano and expounded. He describes how an athletic boy, a member of the football team, declared, when the concert was over, that there was nothing to live for during the rest of the half, apparently not even football. No wonder that the writer of this letter should respectfully deride a former Head Master of Eton for his approval of choral singing, on account of its “moral and political value.â€
I have always felt that the best teaching I received was in two practical matters, viz., how to play the flute, and how to use a microscope. It may be said that these were subjects in which I took a natural and spontaneous interest, and were therefore easily taught. This is no doubt partly true, but I do not think it depended on any special attractionfor music or microscopy, but on something wider—on the novelty of being taught to do something physical, something with one’s hands and ears and eyes. I am sure boys ought to have more practical teaching—not necessarily in science, but such things as mild carpentering, the tying of knots, and such exercise in rough weighing and measuring as would form a basis for a little elementary physics. The same is true of girls, and in one way they need handiwork more than boys. I found, in my Cambridge class of practical plant-physiology, that the girls had not such ‘deft fingers’ as their brothers; I believe the difference is largely due to the boys having played with string and knives, etc., for many idle hours. Both boys and girls must be taught to use, not only their hands, but their eyes. It seems to me piteous that when I was at school there was absolutely nothing done to keep alive the natural sharp-eyedness of children. I remember vividly the intense pleasure which my father gave me (a very small boy) by showing surprise at my knowledge of common trees and shrubs in a winter coppice. I am sure that school did much to kill the power of observation in me.
It may be that observation is an essentially transitory quality, a fleeting ancestral reminiscence, a trail of glory, like other savage traits in children. But more than now survives might be preserved to us by training at school. It ought not to be possible for a boy to come up to a University so blind and helpless as to describe a wall-flower (which has six obvious stamens arranged in a striking pattern) as having “about five stamens.â€Yet this I experienced in an examination of medical students. Describing an object placed before him is excellent training in observation for a boy. And the capacity of describing an object by memory should also be cultivated. Remember what Dr. Noel says in Stevenson’s story of the Saratoga Trunk, and how we may fail in a question of life and death because we cannot describe the mysterious stranger who dogs our footsteps.
To return for a moment to the description of an object. It not only practises the power of observation, but is also excellent exercise in writing English, far better as it seems to me than the usual essay on the usual subjects. In describing a given object the pupil has not to seek for material—it is there before him. He need not recall his feelings during a country walk, or the way he spent his time in the Christmas holidays, or vainly search for facts on the character of Oliver Cromwell. He can concentrate on arrangement, on directness and clearness. My experience of the essays set to candidates in the Natural Science Tripos was most depressing. A man who could write a good plain answer to an ordinary examination question becomes ornate and tiresome when he is told to write an essay. Such candidates have clearly never heard the admirable statement by Canon Ainger of the style expected in writers in the Dictionary of Natural Biography, “No flowers by request.â€Â Nor can they have known that other bit of advice, “You have no idea what strength it gives to your style to leave out every other word.â€Â I have heard suggested another method of checking the naturaldiffuseness of the youthful essayist, namely, to make him confine himself to a definite number of words, I have even heard an essay on a post card recommended.
For myself, I believe the best exercise in English I ever had was the correction of my father’s proof-sheets. What I found so educational was the necessity of having to explain clearly and exactly why I objected to a given sentence, since I naturally could not baldly express my disapproval. It was not only good training, but as has been well said by my sister (who also helped in this way), “It was inexpressibly exhilarating to work for himâ€â€”and she continues—referring to the generous way in which he took our suggestions, “I think I felt the singular modesty and graciousness of his nature through thus working for him in a way I should never otherwise have done.â€
How far every boy ought to be made to do mathematics (beyond simple arithmetic) I cannot say. I know that I am extremely grateful for the small amount of mathematics forced into me. I am even thankful for a very mechanical side of the subject, namely, the use of mathematical tables in general, and for being compelled to work out innumerable sums by logarithms, which we had to do in a “neat tabular form†to quote our precise master’s words.
Certainly my opportunities were strikingly better than my father’s, who records that at Shrewsbury School nothing[85]was taught but classics,ancient history and ancient geography. Euclid, which he liked and felt to be educational, was taught by a private tutor who had the attractive characteristic of wearing top boots.
I now pass from general education to the teaching of science. When I went to Cambridge in 1866, the teaching, as far as the biological sciences went, was in a somewhat dead condition. Indeed, I hardly think it had advanced much from the state of things which existed in 1828, when my father entered Christ’s College. Cambridge was a turning point in his scientific life, chiefly through Professor Henslow’s discovery that the youth, whom his father Dr. R. W. Darwin thought likely to be a mere sporting man and a disgrace to his family, was really a remarkable person, possessed by a burning zeal for science. Henslow made a friend of my father (he was known as the “man who walks with Henslowâ€), and recommended him as naturalist to the “Beagle,†where he was made into a man of science.
In my time there were two ways of acquiring knowledge: attending the lectures of University professors, and going to acoach. Lectures, as my father has said, have “no advantages and many disadvantages . . . compared with reading.â€Â And the same view (or heresy as he confesses it to be) has been well given by the late Henry Sidgwick in hisMiscellaneous Essays(1904). He holds that a purely expository lecture, without experiments or specimens, is something very like a barbarism, an echo of the days before printing was invented. He points out too how there is every temptation to theteacher not to publish his lectures. Thus the students who live elsewhere, and therefore cannot attend his course, “are deprived of useful instruction,†and the students who do attend them have to receive it in an inconvenient form, in order that the Professor may be enabled to fulfil withéclatthe traditional conception of his function (op. cit., p. 347). One set of lectures, which as a medical student I was compelled to attend, were so dull that I literally could not listen to them, but I got into a quiet corner and read Swift’sJournal to Stella, and for that opportunity I am certainly grateful.
A course I thoroughly liked was that given by the late Sir George Humphry, the Professor of Anatomy. He used to sit balancing himself on a stool, with his great hungry eyes fixed on us, talking in plain direct terms of anatomy enlivened by physiology. The one point that remains with me is the way in which he would stop and wonder over the facts he brought before us: “This is a wonderful thing, one of the most wonderful things in the world, I know nothing about it—no one knows—you had better try and find out, some of youâ€; simple words enough, but they struck a chord of romance in some of his hearers. I remember another teacher of anatomy in London who stirred our wonder in quite another way, for he made us marvel how any man could repeat by heart Gray’s book on Anatomy for an hour, and wonder too, why we should be compelled to listen.
The private tutors or coaches to whom most Cambridge students of natural history went were, as far as my experience went, hopelessly bad. Mycoach tried to ensure that I knew certain inferior books well enough to be examined in them, but he never showed me a specimen, and never attempted to ensure that I should have any sort of first-hand knowledge. We were also taught by the Curator of the Botanic Garden, a completely uneducated man, and in all ways as different from the present learned and cultivated Curator as it is possible to imagine. He, like my other coach, simply insisted that we should know by heart a very bad text-book, on which he cross-examined us as we walked round the Botanic Garden. As far as my recollection goes he never stopped to show us a flower or a leaf, and we had nobody to help us to a sight of the minute structure of plants as seen with a microscope, about which, however, we could talk eloquently from the book.
I sometimes wonder that fire did not descend from heaven and destroy a University which so sinned against the first elements of knowing, in neglecting the distinction between what we learn by our own personal experience and what we acquire from books.
Of course there are some sciences which have their origin in practical matters,e.g., chemistry, which originated partly in alchemy and partly in what is now the work of the druggist; such a science was fortunate, in that no one objected to its claim for practical teaching. Nevertheless, the student of chemistry in my day easily fell into a lamentable dulness of different coloured precipitates. I should have liked to do something quantitative, however rough, to get away from theeverlasting test-tube, and to make, for instance, some of the historic experiments with gases.
Human anatomy again was always taught practically,i.e., by work in the dissecting-room. But owing to the manner in which medical students were examined, the subject failed to have the value it might have had; minute questions were asked which no amount of dissecting would enable us to answer. The book had to be learned by heart, and I shudder as I remember the futile labour entailed. And the examination was so arranged, that whilst we were “cramming†anatomy we had also to suffer over another subject, materia medica, which was almost entirely useless, and wearisome beyond belief. Much of it was about as rational a subject to a physician as to a surgeon would be a minute knowledge of how his knives were made and how steel is manufactured. I remember how, after getting through this double ordeal of cram on drugs and on the structure of the body, I heard a surgeon say in lecture: “This is one of the very few occasions on which you must know your anatomy.â€Â I recall the anger and contempt I then felt for the educational authorities, as I remembered the drudgery I had gone through.
The want of organised practical work in zoology was perhaps a blessing in disguise. For it led me to struggle with the subject by myself. I used to get snails and slugs and dissect their dead bodies, comparing my results with books hunted up in the University Library, and this was a real bit of education. I remember too that a thoughtful brother sent me a dead porpoise, which (to thebest of my belief) I dissected, to the horror of the bedmaker, in my College rooms.
Then the late Mr. Clark, superintendent of the Museum of Zoology, and one of the kindest of men, occasionally gave us beasts to cut up. I shall never forget my pride of heart when a preparation which I made of a hedgehog’s inside was placed in the Museum.