THE BOOK OF THE CLASS OF NINETEEN-ELEVEN 103

 

 

—you must excuse me with Mr. Blossom if the English words have their French conno-
tation for me, remembering that I once spent a winter in Paris—this class met once every
two weeks in a little study and chanted, more or less in chorus, one or two chapters of
Martin’s Human Body. We had no laboratory, no apparatus—not even one little vertebra
or skull. At first I tried to look up things on those horrible diagrams in the book. You
know the kind,—a large mass of different shades of black with little, straight lines
running out into the open and little letters at the far ends of these lines. You trace the
line r to its apparent source in the mass, then you search in the list beneath, and find
r, the liver. But often in recitation I found that I had mistaken the true source of line m or r,
and had confused the liver with some other important but dissimilar organ. I used to
feel like the old man in Dickens—“O my lights and limbs, garoo! O, my lungs and
liver, garoo!”’ So I gave up, and took to simple memorising.

At college, happily, science is a different matter. Hand in hand with a timid friend,
I braved my first Physics lecture, expecting to have hurled at my head a set of wild words
such as I had heard biological friends learning. But Dr. Huff leaned against his desk
and struck a ball with his hand, and asked us why the ball moved. He advised us
confidentially, to think it over, and to come to Lab at two. There he set us at measuring
inches and weighing ounces, and discussed the relative merits of farming in Indiana and
Illinois. It was all mild and pleasant and friendly. In fact, Physics Lab offers unsurpassed
opportunities for friendship. You work with some one else (and in my day, if you paid
court to Miss Lowater you could choose your partner). And when together you have
propped weights with sticks that promptly fall down, and have forgotten to write that
fatal second per second in discussing acceleration, or when, after an hour’s calculation,
you have had an error of 63 per cent. and found that you have omitted, also together,
to multiply by that omnipresent 980,—well, it gives you a feeling of having lived and
suffered together that penetrats to the soul—or function of hoping, I believe is the scientific
term for soul.

Physics Lab is conducive as well to a pleasant feeling of superiority. It is, I am told,
unique among Minor Labs in that students do not all do the same thing at the same time.
So one has always a chance—which my co-worker and I never failed to seize—to regard
one’s own experiment as the choice selection of the day’s labour, and to consider its
allotment as a signal mark of true love and esteem—hence to pity all those wrestling with
inferior experiments. Only at the end of the year I discovered that this conviction of

mine was shared by the entire class. :