i 7 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Writing of student days at King's College where, or at the home of 

 Professor Partridge, he came in contact with such men as Dasent, 

 Daniell, Todd, Smee and Wheatstone he says: 



The signs of advance were all about and in the air. The microscope had 

 rather suddenly attained a position of much enhanced importance; it was now 

 mounted solidly, with really good working stages and with good glasses. Powell 

 was the principal maker of it, and a Powell's microscope was an object almost 

 of worship to advanced students. 



The impression from his first work in Trinity College, Cambridge, 



in 1840 are worth quoting for those interested in education, 



I soon became conscious of the power and thoroughness of the work about 

 me, as of a far superior order to anything I had previously witnessed. At the 

 same time I wondered at its narrowness, for not a soul seemed to have the 

 slightest knowledge of, or interest in, what I had acquired in my medical 

 education and what we have since learnt to call Biology. The religious dogmas 

 were of a more archaic type than I had latterly learnt to hold. I thought that 

 just as the medicals wanted the thoroughness of the classicals and of the mathe- 

 maticians, so these wanted at least an elementary knowledge of what was 

 familiar to the medicals. Great and salutary changes have long since been 

 introduced, and the above criticism, which was perfectly just at the time, is now, 

 I believe and trust, almost wholly out of date. 



It is perhaps fortunate that in 1840 Galton found his knowledge of 

 chemistry and German hardly sufficiently advanced for him to profit 

 by Liebig's teaching in Giessen, for the spirit of travel was strong 

 within him and he " determined to throw that plan over, to make a 

 dash and go as far as my money allowed." This dash carried him from 

 Giessen to Linz, thence by rowboat to Vienna, by steamer down the 

 Danube, overland to the Black Sea, to Constantinople, Smyrna, Syra, 

 Trieste and home by way of northern Italy and Switzerland. " This 

 little expedition proved to be an important factor in moulding my 

 after-life. It vastly widened my views of humanity and civilization, 

 and confirmed aspirations for travel which were afterwards indulged." 



The next lesson in travel was a journey up the Nile, where by good 

 fortune one Arnaud Bey urged him not to be content with the attain- 

 ments of ordinary tourists but to strike overland by camel in the cara- 

 van of tbe Sheikh of the Bisbari Desert to Berber. 



A caravan yields so many strange experiences and affords so many occa- 

 sions of mutual helpfulness and of friendships, that it is easy to understand the 

 importance of the Hadj pilgrimage in hunting the Moslems. I have often 

 wished that something of the sort could be revived among ourselves, such as the 

 famous Canterbury Pilgrimage of Chaucer, but the religious motive for real 

 pilgrimages is generally wanting in Protestant countries. The congresses of 

 large itinerant societies like the British Association, in some few respects may 

 be considered as taking the place of pilgrimages, but they want the long 

 hours and days of open-air life, hard exercise and leisure. 



Prom Berber a boat was hired to work up to Khartum and from 

 tbence a short excursion was made up the White Nile. Later his path 



