thing of the
books. A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existence
specialising in Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to
produce text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality
of knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and models
and instructions that should give precisely the method and gestures
esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book was written
in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and test
questions extracted from papers set in former years were appended to
every chapter. By means of these last the teacher was able to train his
class to the very highest level of grant-earning efficiency, and very
naturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. First he posed
his pupils with questions and then dictated model replies.

That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an
elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death, and it is
so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawn
occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriously
scribbling class sitting in rows of desks before him. Occasionally he
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 to see. 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 never really 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 possibly help it, because in the
first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good
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