It is not my place to speak of Hales’ work in animal physiology, nor of those researches bearing on the welfare of the human race which occupied his later years. Thus he wrote against the habit of drinking spirits, and made experiments on ventilation by which he benefited English and French prisons, and even the House of Commons; then too he was occupied in attempts to improve the method of distilling potable water at sea, and of preserving meat and biscuit on long voyages. [139a]
We are concerned with him simply as a vegetable physiologist, and in that character his fame is imperishable. Of the book which I have been using as my text, namely, Vegetable Staticks, Sachs says: “It was the first comprehensive work the world had seen which was devoted to the nutrition of plants and the movement of their sap. . . . Hales had the art of making plants reveal themselves. By experiments carefully planned and cunningly carried out he forced them to betray the energies hidden in their apparently inactive bodies.” [139b] These words, spoken by a great physiologist of our day, form a fitting tribute to one who is justly described as the father of physiology.
IX
NULLIUS IN VERBA [140]
There is a well-known story of Charles Darwin which I shall venture to repeat, because nothing can better emphasise the contrast between Shrewsbury School as it is and as it was.
Charles Darwin used, as a boy, to work at chemistry in a rough laboratory fitted up in the tool-house at his home in Shrewsbury. The fact that he did so became known to his school-fellows, and he was nicknamed “Gas.” I have an old Delphine Virgil of my father’s in which this word is scrawled, together with the name Miss Case, no doubt a sneer at his having come from Case’s preparatory school. Dr. Butler, the Head Master, heard of the chemical work, and Charles Darwin was once publicly rebuked by that alarming person for wasting his time on such useless subjects. My father adds, “He called me very unjustly a poco curante, and as I did not understand what he meant it seemed to me a fearful reproach.” A poco curante means of course “a don’t-care person” or one who takes no interest in things, and might perhaps be translated by “slacker.” I do not suppose that Dr. Butler is likely ever to be forgotten, but as it is, he is sure of a reasonable
share of immortality as the author of a description so magnificently inappropriate. [141a]
This is the contrast I referred to; on one hand a Head Master in 1822 doing his best to discourage a boy from acquiring knowledge of a great subject in the best possible way, i.e. by experiment. And on the other, a Head Master of the same school in 1911 encouraging, with a wise zeal, the rational study of science as a regular part of the school course. It may not be possible to trace out the complete evolution of these Darwin Buildings, but I like to fancy that the germ from which they have sprung is that tool house at the Mount. [141b]
It is some comfort to us to know that Shrewsbury was not the only place which failed to educate my father in the regulation lines. When he left school he went to Edinburgh University to study
medicine. But he found anatomy and materia medica intolerable, and the operating theatre was a horror. So he began to work at science in his own way. He learned to stuff birds from an old negro who had known Waterton. Of this instructor he says, “I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man.” He also caught sea beasts in the pools on the shore, and made one or two small observations, which were communicated to the Plinian Society.
Then he was sent to Cambridge with a view to taking Orders. He enjoyed himself riding and shooting, and especially in catching beetles in the fens. But also in more intellectual ways, as in listening to the anthem in King’s Chapel, and looking at the pictures in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Henslow, the Professor of Botany treated him as a friend rather than as a pupil, and finally settled his career by sending him round the world in H.M.S. Beagle. He entered the ship an undergraduate, and left it after five years a man of science. I give these well known details to show how little he profited by any regular course of study either at Shrewsbury, Edinburgh, or Cambridge. His start in life depended on the recognition of his capacity by Henslow, and was nearly wrecked by FitzRoy, the Captain of the Beagle, suspecting that no one with a nose like my father’s could be an energetic person.