talent for drawing, had it been cultivated,
might have brought him into the front rank of artists; but on the
perverse principle, then common, that training is either useless to
native capacity or ruins it, he remained untaught, and his vigorous
draughtsmanship, invaluable as it was in his scientific career, never
reached its full technical perfection. But the sketches which he
delighted to make on his travels reveal the artist's eye, if not his
trained hand.

His regular schooling was of the scantiest. For two years, from the
age of eight to ten, he was at the Ealing school. It was a semi-public
school of the old unreformed type. What did a little boy learn there?
The rudiments of Latin, of arithmetic, and divinity may be regarded as
certain. Greek is improbable, and, in fact, I think my father had no
school foundation to build upon when he took up Greek at the age of
fifty-five in order to read in the original precisely what Aristotle
had written, and not what he was said to have written, about his
dissection of the heart.

For the rest, his experience of such a school, before Dr. Arnold's
reforming spirit had made itself felt over the country, is eloquent
testimony to the need of it.

Though my way of life [he writes] has made me acquainted
with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the
lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at
school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average
lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil
as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about
as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were
baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle
for existence among ourselves; bullying was the least of the
ill practices current among us.

One bright spot in these recollections was the licking of an
intolerable bully, a certain wild-cat element in him making up for
lack of weight. But, alas for justice, "I--the victor--had a black
eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace
and he did not." A dozen years later he ran across this lad in
Sydney, acting as an ostler, a transported convict who had, moreover,
undergone more than one colonial conviction.

This brief school career was ended by the break-up of the Ealing
establishment. After Dr. Nicholas's death, his sons tried to carry on
the school; but the numbers fell off, and George