Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/152

 keep hold on the means of making their careers not only immediately useful, but a source of self-culture, of permanent improvement to science, and of blessing to mankind.

An obstacle of a serious kind to the adoption of a scientific course arises from the defective elementary teaching of the schools. The faculty of observation is hardly at all cultivated, and a student beginning to work at science in a college has still to master the rudimentary notions which ought to have been familiar to him from early childhood. Steps have lately been taken, I understand, to improve the means and appliances in the Government schools for teaching rudimentary mechanics, but the teachers themselves need teaching how to teach. They need still more a living interest in the facts of outward nature. Where this exists, the common incidents of every-day life can be made the basis of an humble, but really useful, scientific teaching; the faculties can be trained to quick and accurate instead of hazy and defective perceptions; and reasoning on the right way of doing a great many familiar acts opens the way to an habitual estimation of forces and relations, an habitual reduction of new cases under known principles, which as far as it goes is a scientific turn of mind. Much, it is obvious, may be done, as much remains to be done in this direction. The gathered inertia of centuries has to be overcome. But, now that a start has been made, I trust that Indian students will take a forward and honourable place in the ranks of scientific learners and even of original investigators. India presents in many ways an inviting field for scientific research in which home-born seekers after truth must have a great advantage over foreigners. Some men there are already amongst us who without the advantages—too slender as these are—which the colleges now afford, have gained distinction in the field of natural science, and who in converse with nature enjoy a serenity of mind which is the chief element of happiness. If we turn our thoughts to such a man as our illustrious Darwin, or to many a one less eminent than he, we cannot but recognize the superiority to conventions and external circumstances which Lucretius has celebrated as the highest fruit of knowledge. This fruit is equally accessible to any student of those whom I see about me if he will but rise to the true level of his calling and follow his great masters not only in their assiduity of toil but in their moral elevation, and their ardent readiness to welcome and diffuse the truth.

Now, gentlemen of the younger generation, as I have dwelt