formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of

desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to

a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and

deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in

coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or

arrange an experiment for them tosee. The room in the Institute in

which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus

prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the

Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with

maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.

But he neverreally did experiments, except that in the class in

systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to

pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possiblyhelp it,

because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen

burner andgood material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second

they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger

the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.

Then thirdly,real experiments involved washing up. And moreover

they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant

learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite

early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the

unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is

fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. Iknew, for

example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic

Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a

glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if youcontinue

<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>