plan of giving every boy in the School a chance of learning science.
When I say that at the present time 270 boys under five masters are at
work in the laboratories, you will realise to what good use they are
being put. As I happen to represent the Royal Society on your Governing
Body it is especially satisfactory to me to know that science is here
taught on the principle expressed by the motto of the Society: "Nullius
in verba," that is to say, not in other people's words, but in your own
observation lies the path of Science.

X
SIR GEORGE DARWIN {152a}

George Howard, the fifth {152b} child of Charles and Emma Darwin, was
born at Down, July 9th, 1845. Why he was christened {152c} George, I
cannot say. It was one of the facts on which we founded a theory that
our parents lost their presence of mind at the font, and gave us names
for which there was neither the excuse of tradition nor of preference on
their own part. His second name, however, commemorates his
great-grandmother, Mary Howard, the first wife of Erasmus Darwin. It
seems possible that George's ill-health and that of his father were
inherited from the Howards. This, at any rate, was Francis Galton's
view, who held that his own excellent health was a heritage from Erasmus
Darwin's second wife. George's second name, Howard, has a certain
appropriateness in his case, for he was the genealogist and herald of our
family, and it is through Mary Howard that the Darwins can, by an
excessively devious route, claim descent from certain eminent people,
_e.g._ John of Gaunt. This is shown in the pedigrees which George wrote
out, and in the elaborate genealogical tree published in Professor's
Pearson's _Life of Francis Galton_. George's parents had moved to Down
in September 1842, and he was born to those quiet surroundings of which
Charles Darwin wrote, "My life goes on like clockwork, and I am fixed on
the spot where I shall end it." It would have been difficult to find a
more retired place so near London. In 1842 a coach drive of some twenty
miles was the only means of access to Down; and even now that railways
have crept closer to it, it is singularly out of the world, with little
to suggest the neighbourhood of London, unless it be the dull haze of
smoke that sometimes clouds the sky. In 1842 such a village,
communicating with the main lines of traffic only by stony tortuous
lanes, may well have been enabled to retain something of its primitive