64 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



but his intellect awoke late; Thomas Cromwell was a ruffian in youth; 

 Thurlow, even at college, was idle and insubordinate; Murchison was a 

 mischievous boy, full of animal spirits, and was not interested in sci- 

 ence till the age of thirty-two; Perkins was reckless and drunken till 

 his conversion. It can scarcely be said that any of these remarkable 

 men, not even Barrow, achieved very great original distinction in 

 purely intellectual fields. In order to go far, it is evidently desirable 

 to start early. 



The influence of education on men of genius is an interesting sub- 

 ject for investigation. It is, however, best studied by considering in 

 detail the history of individual cases; generalized statements cannot 

 be expected to throw much light on it. I have made no exact notes 

 concerning the school education of the eminent persons at present 

 under consideration; it is evident that as a rule they received the 

 ordinary school education of children of their class, and very few 

 were, on account of poverty or social class, shut out from school educa- 

 tion. A small but notable proportion were educated at home, being 

 debarred from school-life by feeble health; a few, also (like J. S. Mill), 

 were specially educated by an intellectual father or mother. 



The fact of university education has been very carefully noted by 

 the national biographers, and it is possible to form a fairly exact notion 

 of the proportion of eminent British men who have enjoyed this ad- 

 vantage. This proportion is decidedly large. The majority (53 per 

 cent.) have, in fact, been at some university. Oxford stands easily 

 at the head; 40 per cent, of those who have had a university education 

 received it at Oxford, and only 33 per cent, at Cambridge. An inter- 

 esting point is observed here; the respective influences of Oxford and 

 Cambridge are due to geographical considerations; there is a kind of 

 educational watershed between Oxford and Cambridge, running north 

 and south, and so placed that Northamptonshire is on the eastern 

 side. Cambridge drains the east coast, including the highly important 

 East Anglian district and the greater part of Yorkshire, whilst Oxford 

 drains the whole of the rest of England as well as Wales. This at 

 once accounts both for the greater number of eminent men who have 

 been at Oxford and for the special characteristics of the two univer- 

 sities, due to the districts that have fed them, the more literary char- 

 acter of Oxford, the more scientific character of Cambridge. The 

 Scotch universities are responsible for 15 per cent, of our eminent 

 men, Edinburgh being at the head, Glasgow and St. Andrews follow- 

 ing at some little distance. Trinity College, Dublin, shows 3 per cent. 

 The remaining S per cent, have studied at one or more foreign univer- 

 sities, sometimes in addition to study at a British university, Paris 

 (the Sorbonno) stands at the head of the foreign universities, having 

 attracted as many English students as all the other European univer- 



