3 ‘an extemporised laboratory, in which he was per- 
mitted to assist by his elder brother, kept him 
late at work, and earned him the nickname of - 
« gas” among his schoolfellows. And there could 
have been no insensibility to literature in one 
who, as a boy, could sit for hours reading Shake- 
‘speare, Milton, Scott, and Byron; who greatly 
admired some of the Odes of Horace; and who, 
‘in later years, on board the “Beagle,” when only 
one book could be carried on an expedition, 
chose a volume of Milton for his companion. 
_ Industry, intellectual interests, the capacity for 
taking pleasure in deductive reasoning, in obser- 
‘yation, in experiment, no less than in the highest 
works of imagination: where these qualities are 
“present any rational system of education should 
“surely be able to make something of them. Un- 
fortunately for Darwin, the Shrewsbury Grammar 
School, though good of its kind, was an institution 
of a type universally prevalent in this country half 
a century ago, and by no means extinet at the 
‘present day. The education given was “strictly 
classical,” “especial attention” being “paid to 
Yerse-making,” while all other subjects, except a 
Tittle ancient geography and history, were ignored. 
- Whether, as in some famous English schools at that 
date and much later, elementary arithmetic was 
also left out of sight does not appear; but the 
instruction in Euclid which gave Charles Darwin 
so much satisfaction was certainly supplied by a 
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