Notes and Comments. 341 
speak of lifelong educators or of persons whose principal work 
was done in education, there occur to me the names of such 
men as Isocrates, Aristotle, Origen, St. Jerome, Cardinal 
Wolsey, Erasmus, Milton, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Dr. 
Johnson, Diderot, Cardinal Mezzofanti, Mazzini, President 
Garfield, Emerson, and Carlyle, who were all content at one 
time or other to make a scanty living by teaching. Perhaps 
the fact that so many persons have taken up education simply 
as a means of livelihood is the reason why there have been so 
many educational failures. In no profession have good men 
and good women done so much lasting harm, or have done it 
so often without beifig aware of it, as in education. For an 
educator like a poet is born; he is seldom made; if he is 
deficient in discipline or insight or sympathy, they are hard 
to win by practice, harder still is it to win the passion for young 
souls; yet the educational profession demands enthusiasm 
above all other qualities, and I used sometimes to say to young 
candidates for office at Harrow that, unless a man honestly 
felt he would sooner be a teacher of boys than a Cabinet Minister 
he would not be a master altogether after my own heart.’ 
THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF PALZOBOTANY. 
In the Botanical Section Prof. Weiss pointed out that the 
great attractiveness of Paleobotany, and the very general 
interest which has been evinced in botanical circles in the 
progress of recent investigations into the structure of fossil 
plants, are due to the light they have thrown upon the relation- 
ship and the evolution of various groups of existing plants. It 
was the lasting achievement of Williamson to have shown, with 
the active co-operation of many working-men naturalists from 
the Lancashire and Yorkshire coalfields, that the structure 
of the coal-measure plants from these districts can be studied 
in microscopic preparations as effectively as has been the case 
with recent plants since the days of Grew and Malpighi. Indeed, 
had Sachs lived to continue his marvellous historical account 
of the rise of botanical knowledge up to the years 1880 or 
1890, he would undoubtedly have drawn attention to the 
remarkable growth of our knowledge of extinct plants gained 
by Binney and Williamson from the plant remains in the 
calcareous nodules of English coal-seams, and by Renault 
from the siliceous pebbles of Autun. We are not likely to 
forget the pioneer work of these veterans, though since then 
investigations of similar concretions from the coal deposits 
of this and other countries have been undertaken by numerous 
workers and have revealed further secrets from that vast 
store of information which lies buried at our feet. 
The possibilities of impression material had indeed been 
practically exhausted in 1870, and further advance could only 
Igiti Oct. 1. 
