Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching--though I am certain he
would have been scared out of his wits by an average Board School class
in half-an-hour--and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding an
improvement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at the
cost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a total
neglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher of
exceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumby
thoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost as much
chemistry as one could get in one of those objectionable shilling
text-books that were then so common....

Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, outside their
science. Or if anything on the unpractical side of ordinary. And that
you will find is the case with "scientists" as a class all the world
over. What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellow
scientists and a mystery to the general public, and what is not is
evident.

There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such
obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human
intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an
almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To
witness some queer, shy, misshapen, greyheaded, self-important, little
discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide
ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his
fellow-men, or to read the anguish of _Nature_ at the "neglect of
science" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society
by, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on the
work of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one to
realise the unfaltering littleness of men.