182 LIFE AND FKIENDSHIP AT KEW 



ment in the branches, hailed him, and they exchanged greetings 

 and fun. As they walked back, they were met by one of the 

 Hooker boys. Hooker told him of the adventure ; the spirit 

 of rivalry was stirred, whereupon he set them on a challenge 

 climb up the cables of the great flagstaff. The result has 

 faded from memory ; the picture that remains is of the central 

 figure ordering them down when honour was satisfied. So, 

 too, he always looked in on the children's parties ; Prof. Oliver 

 remembers his appearing from under the table as a lion, and 

 a very fine lion he made. 



It was this same buoyancy of spirit that made it so difficult 

 to induce him to talk of the past. In a moment he was back 

 in the present and the future, the things that were being done, 

 the things that still might be accomplished. 



His unceasing interest in the education of his sons, as they 

 reached school age, is reflected in his letters both to Darwin, 

 whose sons were past that age, and to Huxley, whose cares 

 in that direction were beginning. In 1872 Charles Hooker was 

 at the International College at Isleworth, under Dr. Leonhard 

 Schmitz, a modern school, where the main stress was laid on 

 science and modern languages. Brian was at a preparatory 

 school. It was disappointing to find that at a scientific school 

 science was not yet emancipated from bookish methods, while 

 at a literary school the headmaster did not know what was 

 inside his books of literature. 



To T. H. Huxley 



(Christmas 1872.) 



I am disgusted with the so-called Science teaching at the 

 International, and have written a sharp remonstrance to 

 Schmitz : it is an utter sham, worse by far than nothing, 

 and calculated to bring the thing into contempt. 



Per contra, Brian brings from Weybridge, as a school 

 prize, a copy of Chaucer, with all its obscenity, verbatim 

 and literatim, reproduced, — a sweet thing for an ingenuous 

 youth of 12 ! So I send a shell into that camp, and am 

 answered that it is a mistake, and that the Master (a Kev. 

 D.D.) never read Chaucer and got it as a prize for another 

 boy who had * been examined in the " Faery Queene." ' I 



