The Education Of A Man Of Science

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Title:     The Education Of A Man Of Science
Author: Francis Darwin [More Titles by Darwin]

An Address to the Association of University
Women 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, may be 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 the Purple 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."

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 republic of 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 could have 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 the Times {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."

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 attraction for 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." 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." 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." I have heard suggested another method of checking the natural diffuseness 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 him"—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."

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 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 everlasting 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." 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 the best 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.

Just as I was leaving Cambridge in 1869 or '70 there arrived that great man, Sir Michael Foster, who organised the revolution in which the futilities of the early 19th century were blown to fragments, and in their place a sound system of practical instruction was created. Foster was discovered by Huxley, and it was through him, and thanks to the patriotism of Trinity College in creating for him the post of Praelector, that Foster got this great opportunity. The effect of what he did for English education has been incalculably great. His pupils have gone forth into all lands, and have spread the art of learning and teaching wherever they have come to rest.

In thinking over the reformation wrought by Michael Foster I am somehow—quite inconsistently—reminded of the great scene in Guy Mannering. I see in imagination the cold dark cave at Warroch Head, where Dirk Hatteraick lurks; he plays the part of False Science in the Mystery Play, and the cave is the Cave of Inanity. Then comes the great flare of light, as Meg Merrilees throws the torch on to the heap of flax, and her cry, "The hour is come and the man!" while Harry Bertram with his supporters rush in and bind False Science fast. Harry Bertram is, of course, Michael Foster, and I should say that Dandie Dinmont is Coutts Trotter. Meg Merrilees is naturally Huxley, who was the magician of the affair (she is always said to have looked like a man). Here all analogy breaks down. Meg was killed by False Science, Huxley was not; indeed it was the other way. Harry Bertram lived happily ever afterwards. Michael Foster was not so fortunate, and I am ashamed to think that before he died he was misunderstood and half forgotten in his own University.

I must apologise for this outburst of incoherence; I am afraid it was not this sort of thing that Tyndall had in mind when he pleaded for the scientific imagination—that is something much more serious.

Not only does the student of to-day get good practical teaching, but he has the great advantage of being under professors who are generally engaged in original work. And if a man can afford the time to stay up after his degree, he is encouraged and helped to undertake research. If practical teaching is the foundation, the protoplasm as it were, of scientific education, I am sure that original work is its soul or spirit.

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.

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.

NOTES

{82} Times, Dec 6, 1910, Educational Supplement.

{85} See, however, a footnote in No. IX. of this volume, p. 141.

{94} Studies in Literature, 1891, p. 100.

[The end]
Francis Darwin's essay: Education Of A Man Of Science

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