The key-note to his interest in it lies probably in the yearning for unity and union in all relations, which was a part of his individuality. This may have dated back to the time when, a puzzled little mortal of eight or nine years old, he was most unwisely allowed to hear his father exhorting and rebuking his parishioners. It seemed to the boy that most of the trouble arose from the fact that human beings, and human beings alone, so far as he knew, were divided into two sexes, and he felt that he would have arranged matters differently. Comfort came to him when his older brother, by showing him the male and female flower of the hazel, gave him some idea of a great law of Nature. Strange comfort, too, it seems, for a boy not yet ten years old! The late Mr. Ebenezer Cooke pointed out long ago[54] that Mr. Graham Wallas had not only overshot the mark in saying that “Darwin transferred the cause of development from within to without,” but that he had himself failed to draw any distinction between the facts of development, as seen in the individual, and the theory of the origin or development of species, which we associate with the names of Darwin and Wallace. Mr. Cooke pointed to Froebel’s connection with Batch, the founder of a Natural History Society, of which Goethe was a member, as showing that he was in direct touch with those who were working out the theory of development of the individual. Froebel himself refers to this Natural History Society in his Autobiography, saying that “students,” of whom he was one, “who had shown living interest and done active work in Natural Science,” were invited to become members, and that this awoke within him “a yearning towards higher scientific knowledge.” At this time Froebel was but a youth of seventeen, with no idea that education was to be his life work. Three years later, he meets a private tutor, “a young man quite out of the common, with actively inquiring mind,” who was “especially fond of making comprehensive schemes of education.” The year after this we find him reading what he can of anthropology and history, and saying of his reading: “It taught me of man in his broad historical relations and set before me the general life of my kind as one great whole.” One year more, and while he is looking for a situation with an architect--in spite of uneasy communing with himself as to how architecture was to be used “for the culture and ennoblement of mankind”--Grüner claps him on the shoulder with “Give up architecture, it is not your vocation at all! Become a teacher.” It is perhaps because Froebel passed thus from interest in biology to interest in education that at this time he gives to his own question, What is the purpose of education?--almost the identical answer that Professor O’Shea puts into the mouth of his biologist[55], and which he sets in opposition to Froebel’s supposed opinions: