840 REPORT— 1895. 



learning botany unless one means to be a botanist ? It might indeed be replied 

 that as the vast majority of people never learn anything efl'ectively, they might as- 

 well try botany as anything else. But Henslow looked only to the mental disci- 

 pline ; and it was characteristic of the man and of his belief in his methods that 

 ■when he was summoned to Court to lecture to the Royal family, his lectures. 

 ' were, in all respects, identical with those he was in the habit of giving to hi» 

 little Hitcbam scholars ';^ and it must be added that they were not less successful. 

 This success naturally attracted attention. Botanical teaching in schools was 

 taken up by the Government, and continues to receive support to the present day. 

 But the primitive spirit has, I am afraid, evaporated. Tlie measurement of results- 

 by means of examination has been fatal to its survival. The teacher has to keep 

 steadily before his eyes the necessity of earning his grant. The educational pro- 

 blem retires into the background. ' The strengthening of the observant faculties,' 

 and the rest of the Ilenslowian programme must give way to the imperious neces- 

 sity of presenting to the examiner candidates equipped with at least the minimum 

 of text-book formulas reproducible on paper. I do not speak in this matter with- 

 out painful experience. The most astute examiner is defeated by the still more 

 astute crammer. The objective basis of the study on which its whole usefulness 

 is built up is promptly thrown aside. If you supply the apple blossom for actual 

 description, you are as likely as not to be furnished with a detailed account of a 

 buttercup. The training of observation has gone by the board, and the exercise of 

 mere memory has taken its place. But a table of logarithms or a Hebrew gram- 

 mar would serve this purpose equally well. Yet I do not despair of Henslow's 

 work still bearing fruit. The examination system will collapse from the sheer im- 

 possibility of carrying it on beyond a certain point. Freed from its trammels, the 

 teacher will have greater scope for individuality, and the result of his labours will 

 be rewarded after some intelligent system of inspection. And here I may claim 

 support from an unexpected quarter. Mr. Gladstone has recently written to a 

 correspondent : — ' I think that the neglect of natural history, in all its multitude 

 of branches, was the grossest defect of our old system of training for the young ; 

 and, further, that little or nothing has been done by way of remedy for that 

 defect in the attempts made to alter or reform that system.' I am sure that the 

 importance and weight of this testimony, coming as it does from one whose training- 

 and sympathies have always been literary, cannot be denied. That there is already- 

 some revival of Henslow's methods, I judge from the fact that I have received ap- 

 plications from Board schools, amounting to some hundreds, for sui-plus specimens 

 from the Kew museums. "Without a special machinery for the purpose I cannot do' 

 much, and perhaps it is well. But my staff have willingly done what was possible,, 

 and from the letters I have received I gather that the labour has not been wholly 

 misspent. 



Museum Aebangement. 



This leads me to the last branch of Henslow's scientific work on which I anj 

 able to touch, that of the arrangement of museums, especially those which 

 being local have little meaning unless their purpose is strictly educational. I 

 think it is now generallj^ admitted that, both iu the larger and narrower aspects of 

 the question, his ideas, which were shared in some measure by Edward Forbes, 

 were not merely far in advance of his time, but were essentially sound. And here 

 I cannot help remarking that the zoologists have perhaps profited more by his 

 teaching than the botanists. I do not know how far Sir William Flower and Pro- 

 fessor Lankester would admit the influence of Henslow's ideas. But, so far as my 

 knowledge goes, I am not aware that, at any rate in Europe, there is anything to- 

 be seen in public museums comparable to the educational work accomplished by 

 the one at the College of Surgeons and the Natural History Museum, and by the 

 other at Oxford. 



I have often thought it singular that in botany we have not kept pace in this 

 matter with our brother naturalists. I do not doubt that vegetable morphology- 

 and a vast number of important facts in evolution, as illustrated from the 



' Memoir, 149. 



