EDUCATION OF A MAN OF SCIENCE 87 



teacher not to publish his lectures. Thus the 

 students who live elsewhere, and therefore cannot 

 attend his course, "are deprived of useful instruc- 

 tion," and the students who do attend them have 

 to receive it in an inconvenient form, in order that 

 the Professor may be enabled to fulfil with eclat 

 the traditional conception of his function {op. cit., 

 p. 347)- One set of lectures, which as a medical 

 student I was compelled to attend, were so dull that 

 I literally could not listen to them, but I got into a 

 quiet corner and read Swift's Journal to Stella, and 

 for that opportunity I am certainly grateful. 



A course I thoroughly liked was that given by the 

 late Sir George Humphry, the Professor of Anatomy. 

 He used to sit balancing himself on a stool, with 

 his great hungry eyes fixed on us, talking in plain 

 direct terms of anatomy enlivened by physiology. 

 The one point that remains with me is the way in 

 which he would stop and wonder over the facts he 

 brought before us : "This is a wonderful thing, one 

 of the most wonderful things in the world, I know 

 nothing about it — no one knows — you had better 

 try and find out, some of you " ; simple words 

 enough, but they struck a chord of romance in some 

 of his hearers. I remember another teacher of 

 anatomy in London who stirred our wonder in 

 quite another way, for he made us marvel how any 

 man could repeat by heart Gray's book on Anatomy 

 for an hour, and wonder too, why we should be 

 compelled to listen. 



The private tutors or coaches to whom most 

 Cambridge students of natural history went were, 

 as far as my experience went, hopelessly bad. My 



