ce which occupied
his later years. Thus he wrote against the habit of drinking spirits,
and made experiments on ventilation by which he benefited English and
French prisons, and even the House of Commons; then too he was occupied
in attempts to improve the method of distilling potable water at sea, and
of preserving meat and biscuit on long voyages. {139a}

We are concerned with him simply as a vegetable physiologist, and in that
character his fame is imperishable. Of the book which I have been using
as my text, namely, _Vegetable Staticks_, Sachs says: "It was the first
comprehensive work the world had seen which was devoted to the nutrition
of plants and the movement of their sap. . . . Hales had the art of
making plants reveal themselves. By experiments carefully planned and
cunningly carried out he forced them to betray the energies hidden in
their apparently inactive bodies." {139b} These words, spoken by a great
physiologist of our day, form a fitting tribute to one who is justly
described as the father of physiology.

IX
NULLIUS IN VERBA {140}

There is a well-known story of Charles Darwin which I shall venture to
repeat, because nothing can better emphasise the contrast between
Shrewsbury School as it is and as it was.

Charles Darwin used, as a boy, to work at chemistry in a rough laboratory
fitted up in the tool-house at his home in Shrewsbury. The fact that he
did so became known to his school-fellows, and he was nicknamed "Gas." I
have an old Delphine Virgil of my father's in which this word is
scrawled, together with the name Miss Case, no doubt a sneer at his
having come from Case's preparatory school. Dr. Butler, the Head Master,
heard of the chemical work, and Charles Darwin was once publicly rebuked
by that alarming person for wasting his time on such useless subjects.
My father adds, "He called me very unjustly a _poco curante_, and as I
did not understand what he meant it seemed to me a fearful reproach." A
_poco curante_ means of course "a don't-care person" or one who takes no
interest in things, and might perhaps be translated by "slacker." I do
not suppose that Dr. Butler is likely ever to be forgotten, but as it is,
he is sure of a reasonable share of immortality as the author of a
description so magnificently inappropriate. {141a}

This is the contrast I referred to; on one hand a Head Master in 1822
doing his best to discourage a boy from acquiring knowledge of a great
s