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 Henslow”), 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 a coach. Lectures, as my father has said, have “no advantages and many disadvantages . . . compared with reading.” And the same view (or heresy as he confesses it to be) has been well given by the late Henry Sidgwick in his Miscellaneous 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 the
teacher 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 with éclat the 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’s Journal 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 you”; 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. My
coach 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 the