Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/74

64 but his intellect awoke late; Thomas Cromwell was a ruffian in youth; Thurlow, even at college, was idle and insubordinate; Murchison was a mischievous boy, full of animal spirits, and was not interested in science till the age of thirty-two; Perkins was reckless and drunken till his conversion. It can scarcely be said that any of these remarkable men, not even Barrow, achieved very great original distinction in purely intellectual fields. In order to go far, it is evidently desirable to start early.

The influence of education on men of genius is an interesting subject for investigation. It is, however, best studied by considering in detail the history of individual cases; generalized statements cannot be expected to throw much light on it. I have made no exact notes concerning the school education of the eminent persons at present under consideration; it is evident that as a rule they received the ordinary school education of children of their class, and very few were, on account of poverty or social class, shut out from school education. A small but notable proportion were educated at home, being debarred from school-life by feeble health; a few, also (like J. S. Mill), were specially educated by an intellectual father or mother.

The fact of university education has been very carefully noted by the national biographers, and it is possible to form a fairly exact notion of the proportion of eminent British men who have enjoyed this advantage. This proportion is decidedly large. The majority (53 per cent.) have, in fact, been at some university. Oxford stands easily at the head; 40 per cent, of those who have had a university education received it at Oxford, and only 33 per cent, at Cambridge. An interesting point is observed here; the respective influences of Oxford and Cambridge are due to geographical considerations; there is a kind of educational watershed between Oxford and Cambridge, running north and south, and so placed that Northamptonshire is on the eastern side. Cambridge drains the east coast, including the highly important East Anglian district and the greater part of Yorkshire, whilst Oxford drains the whole of the rest of England as well as Wales. This at once accounts both for the greater number of eminent men who have been at Oxford and for the special characteristics of the two universities, due to the districts that have fed them, the more literary character of Oxford, the more scientific character of Cambridge. The Scotch universities are responsible for 15 per cent, of our eminent men, Edinburgh being at the head, Glasgow and St. Andrews following at some little distance. Trinity College, Dublin, shows 3 per cent. The remaining S per cent, have studied at one or more foreign universities, sometimes in addition to study at a British university, Paris (the Sorbonne) stands at the head of the foreign universities, having attracted as many English students as all the other European