ture, without experiments or specimens, is something very like a
barbarism, an echo of the days before printing was invented. He points
out too how there is every temptation to the teacher not to publish his
lectures. Thus the students who live elsewhere, and therefore cannot
attend his course, "are deprived of useful instruction," and the students
who do attend them have to receive it in an inconvenient form, in order
that the Professor may be enabled to fulfil with _eclat_ the traditional
conception of his function (_op. cit._, p. 347). One set of lectures,
which as a medical student I was compelled to attend, were so dull that I
literally could not listen to them, but I got into a quiet corner and
read Swift's _Journal to Stella_, and for that opportunity I am certainly
grateful.

A course I thoroughly liked was that given by the late Sir George
Humphry, the Professor of Anatomy. He used to sit balancing himself on a
stool, with his great hungry eyes fixed on us, talking in plain direct
terms of anatomy enlivened by physiology. The one point that remains
with me is the way in which he would stop and wonder over the facts he
brought before us: "This is a wonderful thing, one of the most wonderful
things in the world, I know nothing about it--no one knows--you had
better try and find out, some of you"; simple words enough, but they
struck a chord of romance in some of his hearers. I remember another
teacher of anatomy in London who stirred our wonder in quite another way,
for he made us marvel how any man could repeat by heart Gray's book on
Anatomy for an hour, and wonder too, why we should be compelled to
listen.

The private tutors or coaches to whom most Cambridge students of natural
history went were, as far as my experience went, hopelessly bad. My
coach tried to ensure that I knew certain inferior books well enough to
be examined in them, but he never showed me a specimen, and never
attempted to ensure that I should have any sort of first-hand knowledge.
We were also taught by the Curator of the Botanic Garden, a completely
uneducated man, and in all ways as different from the present learned and
cultivated Curator as it is possible to imagine. He, like my other
coach, simply insisted that we should know by heart a very bad text-book,
on which he cross-examined us as we walked round the Botanic Garden. As
far as my recollection goes he never stopped to show us a flower or a
leaf, and we had nobody to h