And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef,
The long, resounding foreland, Pharos stands.

These are thy works, O father, these thy crown;

*

This hast thou done; and I-can I be base ?
I must arise, O father, and to port
Some lost complaining seaman pilot home.

Were I a schoolmaster-invested with a cure of boyish souls-I would, when the fitting time came, take every boy under my charge to Westminster Abbey: not, in the first instance, to the Poets' Corner, that treasure-house of sacred memories, but to the spot where, within ten yards of each other, Newton and Darwin rest. There I would bid him remember how England, through these her sons, has reared two of the great guiding-lights of the human intellect; and I would urge him to say to his motherland, as Stevenson to his father:

This hast thou done; and I-can I be base?

That is a line which should sound like a trumpet-call in the ear of every generous lad, as history-which includes, of course, not only literature, but the history of science-recalls to him the achievements of his fathers.

The last word of each of the three parts of the Divina Commedia is "stelle" (stars). To the stars Dante always returned; and they must indeed be the last word of any utterance, be it in glorious verse or humble prose, that is concerned with the mystery of man's relation to the infinite. This it is that, to the thinking mind, lends life at once its zest and its dignity. This it is that reduces to an infinitesimal pettiness all our cupidities, our vanities, our egoisms. What are we to say, then, of the education which leaves the boy, on the threshold of manhood, untouched by the incredible romance of his position in time and eternity, and conscious of life only as commonplace affair, to be got through somehow by the aid of "pleasures," sensual and æsthetic, helped out by factitious excitement over various forms of child's-play? I believe, and have tried to show, that the education which arrives at this impotent issue is quite unnecessarily and indefensibly stupid. I believe that, "if youth but knew," life would take on a wholly different and far nobler and happier complexion, even for the average boy. Let him learn, from wherever his lot is cast in this inexpressibly beautiful and precious land of

England, to watch the thronging snow-storm of worlds, magically arrested in the abyss of space, and to realise that he is bound to them, and they to him, by chains of which the snapping of a single one would mean the ruin of the universe. Let him habituate his mind to this overwhelming conception, and it will need no external imperative, no contract of reward or punishment, to bring home to him the ineptitude of mean thought or ignoble action

Before the stony face of Time,

And looked at by the silent stars.

APPENDIX OF ILLUSTRATIVE
EXTRACTS I

A. THE INFINITELY LITTLE.

From a report of Professor Darwin's Presidential Address at the meeting of the British Association at Cape Town, August

15, 1905.

Professor Darwin concluded the first part of his address with some remarks on the size of atoms and their combination with molecules. His remarks on the size of atoms may be best quoted verbatim. "To obtain any adequate conception of their size we must betake ourselves to a scheme of threefold

The extracts from Herbert Spencer are made by permission of Messrs. Williams & Norgate; from Sir Joshua Fitch, by permission of the Cambridge University Press; from The Upton Letters, by permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.; from Hugh Rendal, by permission of Mr. Alston Rivers.

1

magnification. Lord Kelvin has shown that if a drop of water were magnified to the size of the earth, the molecules of water would be of a size intermediate between that of a cricket-ball and of a marble. Now each molecule contains three atoms, two being of hydrogen and one of oxygen. The molecule. system probably presents some sort of analogy with that of a triple star; the three atoms, replacing the stars, revolving about one another in some sort of dance which cannot be exactly described. I doubt whether it is possible to say how large a part of the space occupied by the whole molecule is occupied by the atoms; but perhaps the atoms bear to the molecule some such relationship as the molecule to the drop of water referred to. Finally, the corpuscles may stand to the atom in a similar scale of magnitude. Accordingly a threefold magnification would be needed to bring these ultimate parts of the atom within the range of our ordinary scales of measurement."

[How such conceptions as that of Lord Kelvin can be physically verified is to me a profound mystery; but metaphysically they are inevitable.]