Whether, like my father in South America, we have the genius to solve big problems in geology and “can hardly sleep at night for thinking of them,” or whether, as with us smaller people, the task is some elusive little point which we triumphantly track to its cause, there is an extraordinary delight in such work. Professor Seward arranged an admirable imitation of original research in his
advanced class on the anatomy of plants at Cambridge. He gave out specimens which the students had never seen; these had to be investigated, and they had to give viva voce accounts of their discoveries to the rest of the class. I believe this to be a method worth imitating, and I may say as an encouragement to women teachers that it was a Newnham student who was especially distinguished in this mutual instruction class.
When I left Cambridge and became a medical student in London, I had the luck to work in the laboratory of Dr. Klein, who was then head of the Brown Institute at Nine Elms. He was fresh from Vienna, with all the continental traditions in favour of original research. Even in the ordinary laboratory work I remember how he tried to throw the romance of practicality over my task. He rushed in one day with a large bread-knife stained with blood in the most sinister manner, saying that a murder had occurred in South Lambeth, and it was for me to determine whether or no the red fluid on the blade was blood!
Later on he set me to work investigating inflammation, and I can still remember his praise of the harmless little paper I wrote. To my secret satisfaction he blamed me for the severity of my remarks on a German Professor who had written on the subject. He told me to strike out my criticism, though he allowed it to be just. I sighed as an author, but obeyed as a pupil,—to misquote the words of Gibbon.
Education is often spoken of, and is praised or blamed, as a method of imparting information to
the young. It is obvious that it is far more than this. It includes the stimulation of tastes, tendencies, or instincts which are inherent but dormant in the pupil. In my case the opportunity, so wisely and kindly given by Dr. Klein, of seeing science in the making—of seeing research from the inside—his giving me the delight of knowing that I had added a minute fragment to the great raging flood of publications which marks the progress of knowledge—all this was a potent factor in my education in the wider sense. That is, it did not merely teach me certain facts, but woke in me the desire to work at science for its own sake. My father finally gave me the necessary opportunity by taking me as his assistant.
No one should ever be able to finish the history of his own education, because it is co-extensive with his life. In my father’s autobiography written shortly before his death, he attempts to sum up the effect of this self-education on himself, both as concerns his experimental research and also in regard to the literary part of his work. An instance of his modest estimate of his own mental progress, is so characteristic that I shall venture to quote it. “I think that I have become a little more skilful in guessing right explanations and in devising experimental tests; but this may probably be the result of mere practice, and of a larger store of knowledge. I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every
sentence, and thus I have been led to see errors in reasoning and in my own observations or those of others.” I repeat that self-education is an endless task. To some men this is a comforting, to others a depressing, fact. Samuel Johnson was, I think, saddened by the making of fresh plans of conduct for each new year. A very different man, though also a Samuel,—Butler, the author of Erewhon, was cheered by the thought that it was always possible to improve. When I knew him he was working as a painter in an untidy room in Clifford’s Inn, without much furniture except a piano. He was poor, and therefore, to save models, painted himself over and over again, the result being a cupboard full of grim heads, which he called the chamber of horrors. He always believed he should succeed at last, and the point I am slowly reaching is that he comforted himself with the belief that John Bellini entirely altered his style when he was between 60 and 70 years of age. One of the French aphorism writers, Vauvenargues, has said (as translated by Lord Morley), “To do great things a man must live as though he had never to die.” [94] I too would recommend the wholesome theory that it is never too late to learn; it helps to keep one from falling too soon into incurable fogeydom.
In the lives of big men it is sometimes possible to see how work done for its own sake may turn out to have had its real value as a piece of training for something of far greater worth. Thus my father
began in 1846 working at a curious Cirripede, i.e., a barnacle, which he had found on his voyage; this led him to examine others, and in the end he worked seven or eight years at this group of animals.