deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in
coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or
arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in
which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus
prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the
Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with
maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.
But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in
systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to
pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,
because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen
burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second
they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger
the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.
Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover
they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant
learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite
early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the
unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is
fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for
example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic
Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a
glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue
to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the
stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face
and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And
I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a
retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and
may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything
of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium
chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says
"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady
student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.
Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite
understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own
undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference
for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an
arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing
whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,
and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it
when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond
illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you
did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in
this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed
from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life
without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then
my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be
copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any
