Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre 



196 



provided for his cousin Charles Darwin, but it stirred an already too 

 active mind intensely, and brought it into touch with many young, 

 keen and sympathetic spirits. The long period of fallow years which 

 followed Galton's Cambridge career, was partly due to a mind recovering 

 from overstrain, partly natural in a youth to whom pleasure was 

 possible, but who had not yet measured its insufficiency. We have so 

 little evidence bearing on Galton's mental evolution during the next six 

 years of his life, that we can but speculate on what those years did for 

 him, and what might have been, had school and college training been 

 individualised. The " Sturm- und Drang Periode " of our lives are 

 claimed by Alma Mater, and she ever afterwards is glorified in our 

 minds by their enchantments, but it is possible that the child gives 

 more than the mothei^ and that the more brilliant her children, the 

 less she regards their individual needs. Why should she make so 

 little attempt to chart the course, which would lead the adventurous 

 mind to those fragrant i.sles, whose enticing scents ever summon it, 

 luring but illusive, across a barren sea ? Why is the personal influence 

 of the older on the younger mind, the unwritten experience, which lies 

 so far above all regular tutelage, and which the sympathetic master- 

 mariner alone can give to the apprentice hand, so rare an item in the 

 debt her more famous children bear to Alma Mater ? Is it due to 

 the want of a thought-out system of education, to the want of the 

 right men, or to an inherent principle in human nature which asserts 

 that real ' education ' is only attained during the solitary cruise " by 

 chartless reef and channel " ? 



^•^^^C 





Visiting Card of Dr Efasmtis Darwin. 



2.5—2 



