er."

Have we not here an early appreciation of method, or must we merely class
the memory with the scene in "Great Expectations," where the terrifying
elder sister, Mrs. Joe, prepares bread and butter for her husband and for
Pip (her little brother) in an eminently just and disagreeable manner.
May I be allowed to add that a love of butter in the big holes is not
hereditary in all branches of the family; I should have loved the sister
who picked it out.

At a later stage in his boyhood Galton transferred his study of method
from his sisters to his schoolmasters. He describes what he suffered
from the absurd limitations (which still exist) in the education of
English boys, and chafed at the teaching he received. "Grammar," he
says, "and the dry rudiments of Latin and Greek were abhorrent to me, for
there seemed so little sense in them." He suffered in fact like his
cousin, Charles Darwin, who groaned over the classics at Shrewsbury
School, and forgot what he learned, even to some of the Greek letters, by
the time he was nineteen.

In 1838, when Galton was sixteen years of age, he became an indoor pupil
at the Birmingham General Hospital. Here the education was at any rate
practical enough, and to this coddled generation it sounds a rough
introduction to medicine. He had to prepare tinctures, extracts,
decoctions, and learned to make pills by hand--a slow enough process. In
later life, when he saw a pill-making machine at work, it must have been
his boyish memories which inspired the characteristic calculation that if
a grandmotherly Government possessed forty-five of these engines, it
could supply each inhabitant of the British Isles with one pill per diem.

It was in the surgery that he had most experience; he and the other
indoor pupils were called up at all hours to dress burns, to patch broken
heads, and reduce dislocations, with, as it seems, very little
instruction. It was doubtless a fine bit of education in self-reliance,
and he must have learned much that was of use in his South African
travels. Whether as a student of method he approved of his rough and
ready education is not quite clear. His genius for experiment, or rather
that priceless capacity for extracting unexpected conclusions from
experience, comes out in his account of a case in the Birmingham
Hospital. An injured drayman was brought in dead drunk, and underwent
amputation of the legs without any signs of feeling pain. This set
Galton