438 THE BIOCOSMOS HISTORICAL. 



younger days. Very glaring are some of his 

 deficiencies of education in his own depart- 

 ment. To the last he never learned to draw 

 and he could not dissect wth any skill; draw- 

 ing and dissecting would now seem the most 

 elementary and indispensable branches to the 

 scientist. He even doubted his mastery over 

 the mother-tongue, and hired an adept to cor- 

 rect the English of his great book (Origin of 

 Species). Now we hazard the opinion that it 

 was just this unconventional education which 

 gave free scope to his genius; he was never 

 case-hardened by the University Professor of 

 Science in transmitted dogmas. It is true that 

 at Cambridge he was deeply influenced by two 

 teachers (Henslow and Sedgwick), yet he did 

 not study regularly with either of them, but 

 went irregularly botanizing and geologizing. 

 To the end he was a free ranger in Nature, 

 whose secret he must catch at first hand in her 

 own untrammeled life, and not in the lecture- 

 room of the Professor, who, however, was a 

 very useful purveyor of knowledge to him. It 

 is an oft-repeated phenomenon: the great dis- 

 coveries are usually not made by the trained 

 scientist at the University, but by the outsider, 

 the amateur, who possesses the inborn love of 

 his theme with the genius to catch its deepest 

 spirit. 



But, returning to the parental household, 



