Jenyns's Memoir of Henslow. 461 



lield about a thousand person s, amongst whom was a sad pro- 

 portion of vagabonds and unemployed. The real property was 

 assessed at £6000 a-year, but the village had no better edu- 

 cational apparatus than a single dame school. Ignorance, 

 crime, beggary, vice, and destitution had possession of the 

 charming place, and supplied enough dragons for the knight of 

 science to assail. Hitcham might have had a new rector of 

 equal benevolence, but less knowledge, and then in spite of 

 well-meaning exhortations, the dragons would have won the 

 day. Not so with Professor Henslow. He studied the cha- 

 racters he had to reform. Cricket, and other manly games 

 which rose under his auspices, prepared their minds as well as 

 their bodies for healthy admonitions of a moral kind, while an 

 annual exhibition of fireworks on the parsonage lawn attracted 

 many to look at specimens of natural or artificial curiosities 

 which no one knew better how to explain. 



He lost no time in establishing a better school, and he insti- 

 tuted ploughing matches, and promoted allotments, to raise the 

 labourer in the social scale. The farmers raised an outcry 

 against this latter innovation. " They held their men," says 

 Mr. Jenyns, " in grievous subjection. They viewed them as 

 little better than slaves to do their work." It was a terrible 

 task to teach these thick-headed farmers that their own in- 

 terests would be served by doing their duty to the labourers. 

 So high did their antagonism rage, and so fully were they im- 

 bued with the kind of feeling that actuated the Cambridge 

 tutors in their opposition to Sir J. E. Smith, that they actually 

 passed a resolution to " refuse all employment, and show no 

 favour to any day labourer who should hold an allotment." 

 Nothing daunted by these threats, Professor Henslow circu- 

 lated a printed statement of his unalterable determination to 

 sustain the rights of the poor, and so the allotments flourished, 

 and the ignorant prejudice was in time put down. 



Another benevolent scheme, in which Science taught Bene- 

 volence what to do, was the establisment of Horticultural Shows, 

 in which prizes were given for things such as wood-carving not 

 specially connected with the object indicated in the name. At 

 these meetings the Professor had his " Marquee Museum/' in 

 which he delivered what he called " lecturets " to all who 

 chose to come. The objects exhibited were selected to suit 

 all tastes, even the children had their case containing a ' ' heap 

 of shells and corals," and a "new device from the last horti- 

 cultural show in Fairy Land." Among the prizes distributed 

 on these occasions were some to the village botanists — botany 

 being a subject of instruction in his village school. On Mon- 

 day he spent one or two hours in this pursuit, " the botanical 

 pupils were all volunteers, and limited in number to forty- two. 



