314 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



been a student at the King's College branch of the University of London. It so 

 happened that at the principal preparatory school I attended, and at King's College, 

 I was encouraged to take up modern languages somewhat extensively. By the 

 time I was nineteen I could speak, read, and write with comparative ease French, 

 Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. In later years I added to these languages Arabic, 

 Hindustani, Swahili, and a general knowledge of many of the Bantu languages of 

 Central Africa. Whilst I was a student at King's College I was equally a student 

 (after passing the necessary examinations) at the Royal Academy of Arts, and 

 there, as at the Zoological Gardens under the late Prof. A. H. Garrod, I went 

 through courses of both human and comparative anatomy, studies which also took 

 me to the museum of the College of Surgeons (of which I am now one of the trustees), 

 where I was much helped by Sir William Flower. The outcome of these studies 

 in biology and painting obtained for me very early in life offers of employment 

 first in West and next in East Africa in connection with scientific expeditions. 

 My year's work as leader of the Kilimanjaro expedition, organised by the Royal 

 Society and the British Association, brought me into relations with the late Lord 

 Salisbury, who gave me a commission in the Consular Service, so that I might 

 embark on political work in Africa. In the course of this I had to learn all the 

 essentials of, at any rate the simpler, military arts, so as to be able to lead or to 

 accompany small armies against Arab slave-trading sultans or powerful native 

 chiefs engaged in the slave trade. I have had much experience at sea on the 

 vessels of our Navy ; I have gone through courses of Botany so as to be able 

 to collect intelligently and to describe the forests and their contents ; my 

 services to Zoology were acknowledged by the Gold Medal of the Zoological 

 Society ; to Geography by other gold medals and foreign distinctions. I have 

 similarly plunged deeply into Ethnology; I have become an expert photographer; 

 I have framed the budgets and looked after the revenue and expenditure of con- 

 siderable States in Africa ; have written a great many consular reports ; have 

 learnt, at any rate, enough Law to deal with the intricacies of consular business, 

 the exercise of magisterial functions at home, and the framing of laws and land 

 settlements in African protectorates. 



I have travelled at different times over a great deal of Southern Asia, perhaps 

 more over Africa than any contemporary Briton, I have seen a great deal of North 

 America and of the West Indies, and something of South America, and have 

 travelled in nearly every European country except Russia. Moreover, unlike so 

 many of my fellow-countrymen, I have made it my business to know Ireland 

 thoroughly, as well as Wales, Scotland, and every portion of England and the 

 Channel Islands. 



And so on, and so on. 



And yet I— and this egotism is only excusable because the kinds of life and 

 experience I have been describing cover hundreds of colleagues and of those 

 travelled men of science who have been leading in this Education argument — am 

 told by a few schoolmasters, professors, and politicians whose knowledge of the 

 Empire by any actual visual experience is practically nil, and whose reading is 

 very limited, and by certain members of Parliament chiefly and perhaps solely 

 educated in political jobbery . . . not geography — that I am not qualified to offer 

 an opinion as to how the youth of this country should be educated. 



On the other hand, the problem we are trying to face and solve as regards 

 national education may be put thus : We are not attacking, at least /am not attack- 

 ing, the two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. I have pointed out repeatedly 

 that they are in the forefront of modern knowledge ; though I deeply regret that 



