I learnt out of badly-written,
condensed little text-books, and with the minimum of experiment, but
still I learnt. Only thirty years ago it was, and I remember I learnt of
the electric light as an expensive, impracticable toy, the telephone as
a curiosity, electric traction as a practical absurdity. There was no
argon, no radium, no phagocytes--at least to my knowledge, and aluminium
was a dear, infrequent metal. The fastest ships in the world went then
at nineteen knots, and no one but a lunatic here and there ever thought
it possible that men might fly.
Many things have happened since then, but the last glance I had of
Wimblehurst two years ago remarked no change whatever in its pleasant
tranquillity. They had not even built any fresh houses--at least not
actually in the town, though about the station there had been some
building. But it was a good place to do work in, for all its quiescence.
I was soon beyond the small requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society's
examination, and as they do not permit candidates to sit for that until
one and twenty, I was presently filling up my time and preventing my
studies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the London
University degree of Bachelor of Science, which impressed me then as
a very splendid but almost impossible achievement.
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