240 ESSAYS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CHEMICAL 



rhyming, from the writer of doggerel to the poet, or many 

 degrees of musical ear, from the man who knows two 

 tunes, the tune of ' God save the King ' and the other 

 tune, to the accomplished musician. But in almost all 

 cases, if caught young, the human being can be trained, 

 more or less ; and, as a matter of fact, natural selection 

 plays its part. Those young men and women who have 

 no natural aptitude for such work and they are usually 

 known by the lack of interest which they take in it do 

 not come to the University. My experience is that the 

 majority, or at least a fair percentage of those who do 

 come, possess germs of the faculty of originating, germs 

 capable of development, in many instances, to a very high 

 degree. It is such persons who are of most value to the 

 country ; it is from them that advance in literature and 

 in science is to be expected ; and many of them will con- 

 tribute to the commercial prosperity of the country. We 

 hear much nowadays of technical education ; huge sums 

 of money are being annually expended on the scrappy 

 scientific education in evening classes of men who have 

 passed a hard day in manual labour, men who lack the 

 previous training necessary to enable them to profit by 

 such instruction. It may be that it is desirable to pro- 

 vide such intellectual relaxation ; I even grant that such 

 means may gradually raise the intellectual level of the 

 country ; but the investment of money in promoting such 

 schemes is not the one likely to bear the most immediate 

 and remunerative fruit. The Universities should be the 

 technical schools ; for a man who has learned to investi- 

 gate can bring his talents to bear on any subject brought 

 under his notice, and it is on the advance, and not the 

 mere dissemination of knowledge, that the prosperity of 

 a country depends. To learn to investigate requires a 

 long and a hard apprenticeship ; the power cannot be 

 acquired by an odd hour spent now and again ; it is as 



