I have thought it worth while to insist thus strongly on the high value attached by Darwin to hypothesis, controlled by observation, in view of certain recent attacks upon this necessary weapon for scientific advance. Thus Bateson, in his “Materials for the Study of Variation” (London, 1894), p. 7, says: “In the old time the facts of Nature were beautiful in themselves and needed not the rouge of speculation to quicken their charm, but that was long ago before Modern Science was born.” The author does not specify the period in the history of science when discovery proceeded without hypothesis. A study of the earlier volumes of the _Philosophical Transactions_ reveals a far greater interest in speculation than in the facts of Nature. We can hardly call those ages anything but speculative which received with approval the suggestions that geese were developed from barnacles which grew upon trees; that swallows hibernated at the bottom of lakes; that the Trade-winds were due to the breath of a sea-weed. Bateson’s statement requires to be reversed in order to become correct. Modern science differs from the science of long ago in its greater attention to the facts of Nature and its more rigid control over the tendency to hypothesis; although hypothesis remains, and must ever remain, as the guide and inspirer of observation and the discovery of fact.[A] Although Darwin has kindled the imagination of hundreds of workers, and has thus been the cause of an immense amount of speculation, science owes him an even larger debt for the innumerable facts discovered under the guidance of this faculty. CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD--EDINBURGH--CAMBRIDGE (1817–31). Of Darwin’s boyhood and school-life we only know the facts given in his brief “Autobiography,” written when he was sixty-seven, together with those collected by his son Francis and appended in the form of notes. He first went to Mr. Case’s day-school in Shrewsbury in 1817, the year of his mother’s death. At this time, although only eight years old, his interest in natural history and in collecting was well established. “The passion for collecting, which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother had this taste.” In the following year he went to Dr. Butler’s school in Shrewsbury, where he remained seven years. He does not appear to have profited much by the classical instruction which at that time received almost exclusive attention. His interest seems to have been chiefly concentrated upon sport; but whenever a subject attracted him he worked hard at it, and it is probable that he would have conveyed a very different impression of his powers to the masters and his father if scientific subjects had been taught, as they are now to a moderate extent in many schools.