To his children the habit of working at barnacles seemed a commonplace human function, like eating or breathing, and it is reported that one of us being taken into the study of a neighbour, and seeing no dissecting table or microscope, asked with justifiable suspicion, “Then where does he do his barnacles?” When I was writing my father’s Life, I asked Mr. Huxley his opinion whether this seven or eight years’ work had been, in his judgment, worth the great labour involved. His answer was that no man is a good judge of the speculative strain which may be put on the raw materials of science, unless he knows at first hand how this raw material is acquired, and this knowledge my father gained by his barnacles. The Origin of Species is the evidence that he did not miscalculate the strain his facts would bear, for his theory is as strong as ever.
There is one influence, of the greatest importance in regard to education, with which I have not attempted to deal. I mean the personal influence of the teacher. This is a part of the pupil’s environment which not even a millionaire can undertake to supply to his pet University. It is rather a thing to pray for, and to treasure when the gods send it to us.
There is a magic in the personal effect of a great teacher, which makes it comparatively unimportant
what sort of science he teaches. In him the How entirely dwarfs the What.
To take an instance. My father’s master, Professor Henslow, was of this type. But some of his advice was extremely bad. Thus he told my father to read Lyell’s Principles, but on no account to believe the theoretical parts of the book. In spite of the warning, my father was at once converted to the doctrines set forth in the Principles, and Lyell was from that time forward the chief influence of his scientific life. But his gratitude to Henslow remained fresh and strong to the day of his death.
The same thing is true of Lyell and his instructors. When he left Oxford and went down to Scotland geologising, he must have been full of Buckland’s teaching, and ought to have believed that the surface of the county of Forfar was just as the Flood left it, some few thousand years ago. But he at once proceeded to discover in Noachian Forfarshire the most striking evidence of geological change actually in progress. So that, under the influence of a great catastrophist, Lyell became the greatest of the uniformitarians, and more than any one man was the destroyer of the older point of view.
The personal effect of teacher on pupil cannot be bought at a price, nor can it be paid for in any coin but gratitude. It is the possibility of earning this payment that makes the best part of a teacher’s life.
VII.
THE PIPE AND TABOR
An Address to a Society Of Morris Dancers, Oxford, February 12, 1914
In the following pages I have brought together some scattered information on the instruments, especially connected with Folk-Dancing, which give the title to my address. The coming to life of a mass of beautiful tunes and dances, in response to the patient search of Mr. Cecil Sharp and a few others, is one of the most magical occurrences of which I have any memory. In a less degree I have experienced the same sense of the unexpected, in learning that in a Kentish village, so near London as often to be darkened by the skirts of town fogs, the ancient superstition still existed of telling the bees that their master is dead. Such an unsuspected lurking of primitive belief in our midst may well give a shock of surprise. But in the resurrection of the mass of hidden music, and of the dying traditions of dances, a web of extraordinary beauty is suddenly revealed—a matter of real importance.