CHARLES DARWIN
ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES
All English universities except Oxford and Cambridge are fairly new. London University is the biggest of the modern English universities and has many colleges and schools.
A university usually has both faculties and departments. The faculties are arts, law, medicine, science and theology. The departments include engineering, economics, commerce, agriculture, music and technology.
At the head of each faculty there is a professor. A staff of teachers called lecturers help him. Professors and lecturers give lectures to large numbers of students or study with small groups, and here the students have a chance to discuss.
All universities admit men and women, but within some universities there are colleges specially for one sex. Most of the universities provide hostels for their students. There are many types of colleges in England. There are colleges within universities. There are teachers' training colleges. There are also technical colleges of various types, colleges of arts and commerce. Colleges give a specialized training.
• Those who wish to become teachers spend three years at a teachers' training college. They study various subjects and learn how to teach, they have practice lessons at schools.
A hundred years ago people believed that plants and animals had always been as they are now. They thought that all the different sorts of living things, including men and women, were put in this world by some mysterious power a few thousand years ago.
It was Charles Darwin, born at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February, 1809,who showed that this was just a legend. As a boy Darwin loved to walk in the country-side, collecting insects, flowers and minerals. He liked to watch his elder brother making chemical experiments. These hobbies interested him much more than Greek and Latin, which were his main subjects at school.
His father, a doctor, sent Charles to Edinburgh University to study medicine. But Charles did not like this. He spent a lot of time with a zoologist friend, witching birds and other animals, and collecting insects in the country-side.
Then his father sent him to Cambridge to be trained as a parson. But Darwin didn't want to be a doctor or a parson. He wanted to be a biologist.
In 1831 he set sail for South America to make maps of the coastline there. Darwin went in the ship to see the animals and plants of other lands. On his voyage round the world he looked carefully at thousands of living things in the sea and on land and came to very important conclusion. Later he wrote his famous work «The Origin of Species». On Snobbery
Snobbery is not so common in England today as it was at the beginning of the century. It still exists, however, and advertisers know how to use it in order to sell their goods.
A snob, the dictionaries tell us, is a person who pays too much respect to social position or wealth. The popular newspapers know that many of their readers are snobs. That is why they give them unimportant and useless information about persons of high social position, photographs of «Lady X and her friends» at a ball or «Lord Y and his friends» at the races.
It is a snobbery that makes some men feel annoyed when on the envelopes of letters addressed to them they find Mr. before their names instes of Esq. after their names. Snobbery explains why many people give their suburban house a name, such as The Oaks, The Pines, The Cedars, even though there are no oak trees, pine trees or cedar trees in their gardens. People of high social position have country houses with names, because a house with a name seems «better» than a house with a number. Numbers make the postman's work much easier, but that is not important.
The advertisers are very clever in their use of snobbery. Motor-car manufacturers, for example advertise the colours of their cars as «Embassy Black», though this is ordinary black,'or «Balmoral Stone». Balmoral Stone is the grey colour of ordinary stone, but Balmoral is also the name of the residence in Scotland of the British Royal family.
The Thanksgiving Day
One day the people of the village suddenly saw a tall Indian who was walking along the street. They were frightened very much, but this Indian came up to them, smiled and said, «Hallo, Yankee!»
Few days later this Indian came to the village again together with some other Indians. They came as friends and helped the white men very much. But white men forgot about this help very quickly, a few years later when many people from Europe came to America, they began to take the land away from the Indians and to kill them.
At last spring came. The people of New Plymouth began to plant corn, and the Indians showed them how to plant maize. In autumn the crops were very good and the people of New Plymouth wanted to make a holiday dinner. They asked the Indians to this dinner, and the Indians brought some wild turkeys as a present. The turkey was an American bird. Very few people in Europe had ever heard about it but when they ate it at this dinner they liked it very much. The people of New Plymouth called their holiday «Thanksgiving Day».
Since that time Thanksgiving Day has been a great holiday in the United States of America, and since that day Americans have always had turkeys for the Thanksgiving Day.