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Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre   195

provided for his cousin Charles Darwin, but it stirred an already too active mind intensely, and brought it into touch with many young, keen and sympathetic spirits. The long period of fallow years which followed Galton's Cambridge career, was partly due to a mind recovering from overstrain, partly natural in a youth to whom pleasure was possible, but who had not yet measured its insufficiency. We have so little evidence bearing on Galton's mental evolution during the next six years of his life, that we can but speculate on what those years did for him, and what might have been, had ' school and college training been individualised. The " Sturm- and Drang Periode " of our lives are claimed by Alma Mater, and she ever afterwards is glorified in our minds by their enchantments, but it is possible that the child gives more than the mother, and that the more brilliant her children, the less she regards their individual needs. Why should she make so little attempt to chart the course, which would lead the adventurous mind to those fragrant isles, whose enticing scents ever summon it, luring but illusive, across a barren sea? Why is' the personal influence of the older on the younger mind, the unwritten experience, which lies so far above all regular tutelage, and which the sympathetic mastermariner. alone can give to the apprentice hand, so rare an item in the debt her more famous children bear to Alma Mater ? Is it due to the want of a thought-out system of education, to the want of the right men, or to an inherent principle in human nature which asserts that real 'education' is only attained during the solitary cruise "by chartless reef and channel " ?

Picture

Visiting Card of Dr Erasmus Darwin.

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