UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON 123 



takes up natural science as a pursuit to be followed 

 through a lifetime. And his distrust of examinations 

 and their results as a means of discovering capacity or 

 rewarding merit often brought him into conflict with 

 those who rely more confidently on the utility of examin- 

 ations as an educational instrument. This is a large 

 question of far-reaching importance upon which unani- 

 mity can never be expected. Even in Germany there 

 is great difference of opinion among the professors in 

 the universities as to the desirability of increasing the 

 number and the stringency of examinations leading to 

 the doctor's degree. 1 



Men of genius like Ramsay are apt to forget, if they 

 become teachers, that the average quality of mind 

 among students is very different from their own, and 

 attempts to apply indiscriminately methods which 

 appeal to their own mental activity and resource are 

 certain to meet with disappointment in the great majority 

 of cases. It is, in fact, too often forgotten not only by 

 teachers but by parents and others that though a 

 natural faculty may be improved by education, it can 

 never be created by any process in those cases where 

 the natural faculty does not already exist. Poets, 

 mathematicians, researchers are born, not made, and 

 all that education can do in any case is to educe, train 

 and strengthen qualities already existent which might 

 otherwise run to waste and produce merely mischief. 



Bailey Saunders, Notes addressed to the U.L. Commissioners, Jan. 

 1899. 



