194 



THOMAS HICK. 



ti'oversy of that Wellington in the esoteric fields of Cosmos, ever 

 evoking his profoundest admiration and faith. 



As a boy, of humble but respectable parentage, Hick was 

 originally destined for manual labour; but what one may be forgiven 

 for calling a lucky accident in the mill where he first went to work 

 involved an injury to his left hand and loss of some fingers. This 

 led him to become a pupil, a teacher, and eventually head master of 

 the Lancasterian School at Leeds. When I first knew him he was 



studying, with more or less definite ideas, for the Degrees he 

 afterwards attained. Science-teaching in schools was then coming 

 to the front as a necessary in the curriculum of middle-class 

 education ; and in the late sixties and early seventies he upheld the 

 banner of nature-study by giving to others in night-classes at the 

 Leeds Mechanics, at Bradford, and elsewhere, a sufficiency of that 

 knowledge on plant life which a more spontaneous curiosity and 

 enthusiasm had led him to seek after for himself. Much of the 

 best woi'k of his life was done in this way, infecting others by his 



