As with not a few other men of "light and leading," neither school nor university did much for him, nor did his boyhood give indication of future greatness. In his answers to the series of questions addressed to various scientific men in 1873 by his distinguished cousin, Francis Galton, he says: "I consider that all I have learnt of any value has been self-taught," and he adds that his education fostered no methods of observation or reasoning. Of the Shrewsbury Grammar School, where, after the death of his mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated potter), in his ninth year, he was placed as a boarder till his sixteenth year, he tells us, in the modest and candid Autobiography printed in the Life and Letters, "nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind." All that he was taught were the classics, and a little ancient geography and history; no mathematics, and no modern languages. Happily, he had inherited a taste for natural history and for collecting, his spoils including not only shells and plants, but also coins and seals. When the fact that he helped his brother in chemical experiments became known to Dr. Butler, the head-master, that desiccated pedagogue publicly rebuked him "for wasting time on such useless subjects." Then his father, angry at finding that he was doing no good at school, reproved him for caring for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and declared that he would be a disgrace to the family! He sent him to Edinburgh University with his brother to study medicine, but Darwin found the dulness of the lectures intolerable, and the sight of blood sickened him, as it did his father. Although the effect of the "incredibly" dry lectures on geology made him--the future Secretary of the Geological Society!--vow never to read a book on the science, or in any way study it, his interest in biological subjects grew, and its first fruits were shown in a paper read before the Plinian Society at Edinburgh in 1826, in which he reported his discovery that the so-called ova of _Flustra_, or the sea-mat, were larvæ. But his father had to accept the fact that Darwin disliked the idea of being a doctor, and fearing that he would degenerate into an idle sporting man, proposed that he should become a clergyman! Darwin says upon this:--