BOTANICAL ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 169 
when he was only twenty-six. I learn from the same 
authority that this to some extent anticipated, but at any rate 
strongly influenced, Sedgwick’s subsequent work in the 
same region. 
BotTanicaL TEACHING. 
Henslow’s method of teaching deserves study. Darwin 
says of his lectures ‘that he liked them much for their 
extreme clearness.’ ‘But,’ he adds, ‘I did not study botany’ 
(i. 48). Yet we must not take this too seriously. Darwin," 
when at the Galapagos, ‘indiscriminately collected every- 
thing in flower on the different islands, and fortunately kept 
my collections separate.’ Fortunately indeed; for it was the 
results extracted from these collections, when worked up 
subsequently by Sir Joseph Hooker, which determined the 
main work of his life. ‘It was such cases as that of the 
Galapagos Archipelago which chiefly led me to study the 
origin of species’ (iii. 159). 
Henslow’s actual method of teaching went some way to 
anticipate the practical methods of which we are all so proud 
‘He was the first to introduce into the botanical examination 
for degrees in London the system of practical examination.’ 
But there was a direct simplicity about his class arrange- 
ments characteristic of the man. ‘A large number of 
specimens....were placed in baskets on a side-table in the 
lecture room, with a number of wooden plates and other 
requisites for dissecting them after a rough fashion, each 
student providing himself with what he wanted before taking 
his seat.25 I do not doubt that the results were, in their 
way, as efficient as we obtain now in more stately laboratories. 
The most interesting feature about his teaching was not, 
however, its academic aspect, but the use he made of botany 
as a general educational instrument. ‘He always held that a 
man of no powers of observation was quite an exception.’!® 
13 Voyage, 421. 14 Memoir, 161. 15 Ibid., 39. 16 Tbid., 163 
