rights, threaten to 'take
proceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned to
the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionally
pungent letter.

That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its remarkable
consequences, which ended my student days altogether, I will tell in the
next chapter.

I say "my failure." Yet there are times when I can even doubt whether
that period was a failure at all, when I become defensively critical of
those exacting courses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic process
of scientific exhaustion from which I was distracted. My mind was not
inactive, even if it fed on forbidden food. I did not learn what my
professors and demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learnt
many things. My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.

After all, those other fellows who took high places in the College
examinations and were the professor's model boys haven't done so
amazingly. Some are professors themselves, some technical experts; not
one can show things done such as I, following my own interest, have
achieved. For I have built boats that smack across the water like
whiplashes; no one ever dreamt of such boats until I built them; and I
have surprised three secrets that are more than technical discoveries,
in the unexpected hiding-places of Nature. I have come nearer flying
than any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a turn for
obeying those rather mediocre professors at the college who proposed
to train my mind? If I had been trained in research--that ridiculous
contradiction in terms--should I have done more than produce additions
to the existing store of little papers with blunted conclusions, of
which there are already too many? I see no sense in mock modesty upon
this matter. Even by the standards of worldly success I am, by the side
of my fellow-students, no failure. I had my F.R.S. by the time I was
thirty-seven, and if I am not very wealthy poverty is as far from me as
the Spanish Inquisition. Suppose I had stamped down on the head of my
wandering curiosity, locked my imagination in a box just when it wanted
to grow out to things, worked by so-and-so's excellent method and
so-and-so's indications, where should I be now?

I may be all wrong in this. It may be I should be a far more efficient
man than I am if I had cut off all those divergent expenditures of
energy, plugged up my curiosity about society with more