truction
or academic training than in almost any other walk of life.

In this connection mention has already been made of the famous botanist
Linnaeus. The whole of his school life was one unremitting protest
against the usual educational methods of endeavouring to force the mind
away from its natural bent. Linnaeus detested metaphysics, Latin, Greek,
and every subject except physics and mathematics, in which he usually
outstripped his fellow-pupils. But his nose was kept to the grindstone
until the authorities informed his father that he was not fit for a
learned education, and recommended his being given some manual
employment. Thus were twelve precious years of the life of one of the
most gifted men of science, save for what he accomplished out of school
hours, wasted to no purpose. It is not to be wondered at that he spoke
of one of his masters as 'a passionate and morose man, better calculated
for extinguishing a youth's talents than for improving them.'

One of the greatest anatomists that ever lived, John Hunter, who
numbered Dr. Jenner amongst his pupils, was scarcely educated at all for
the first twenty years of his life. Mr. Smiles states that 'it was with
difficulty that he acquired the arts of reading and writing.' Originally
a carpenter, he became assistant to his brother, who was established in
London as a surgeon. He acquired all his knowledge of anatomy in the
dissecting-room, and owed everything he had learnt to his own hard work
and habit of thinking things out for himself.

'The brilliant Sir Humphry Davy,' says Mr. Smiles, 'was no cleverer than
other boys. His teacher, Dr. Cardew, once said of him, "While he was
with me I could not discern the faculties by which he was so much
distinguished." Indeed, Davy himself in after life considered it
fortunate that he had been left to "enjoy so much idleness" at school.'

Newton was always at the bottom of his class, until he suddenly took it
into his head to give a boy, whom he had already thrashed in another
sense, an intellectual beating. 'It is very probable,' writes Sir David
Brewster in his biography, 'that Newton's idleness arose from the
occupation of his mind with subjects in which he felt a deeper
interest.' Nobody could have penned a more incisive indictment against
the imbecility of an education system that forces all boys, irrespective
of their wishes or talents, into a fixed groove. It was Newton who, in
answer to an inquiry as to how the prin