26 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL: MEN 
My predecessors in this chair have, each in his turn, talked 
to you of the subjects they have made their own ; and if I am 
to come near to them at all, I shall be obliged to talk to you 
on a subject which, so far as I can judge, everybody has made 
his own. You can hardly meet the man who is not prepared 
to talk about ‘Education’. Even if he has had none, he is 
ready to say how much (or how little) he has missed it, or 
what it ought to have been if he had had it. It is often said 
there is no bore like the educational bore. The other day a 
very good friend of mine—an admirable and humane man— 
told me roundly he hated the very word education. I can 
well understand it; but I bespeak your sympathy. If every 
man you met who used or did not use coal gas was prepared 
to offer you advice on the construction of a gasholder, you 
would no doubt suggest, more or less directly, that he might 
better mind his own business. But we whose business is 
education cannot do likewise. We have to sit and listen, with 
what patience we can summon, to every kind of public speaker 
or writer who chooses to open the floodgates of his eloquence 
upon us. But I suppose that if people only spoke in public 
about what they had studied, the hush that would come upon 
the world would be almost deathly. 
I should like to put before you a few of the conclusions to 
which I have come after occupying for a quarter of a century 
a professorial chair in an institution which, in large measure, 
was designed to subserve the educational requirements of 
industry. At the risk of being thought egotistical, I will 
explain in the first instance that my father was a railway 
manager, and that I consequently passed my early life in an 
atmosphere of strenuous business, where, for mere amusement, 
I learnt the construction and working of a locomotive, how to 
manage a signal box, and did a number of other practical 
things. My first chemical experience was, in fact, in the rather 
odd work of analysing the fuel, oils, metals, paints, and other 
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