Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/596

580 by the universities of England and of this country show that this is the sole test of scientific scholarship on which most of these universities rely, in awarding their highest honors to students in physical science. The power of so mastering a subject as to be able to reproduce any portion of it with accuracy, completeness, and elegance, at a written examination, is the normal result of literary, not of scientific, culture, and the power is of the same order, whether the subject-matter be philology, literature, art, or science. Indeed, scientific are, as a rule, much less adapted than literary subjects to the cultivation of this power. Moreover, it is also true that scholars, having attained to a very high degree of scholarship, may not possess this power of stating clearly and concisely the knowledge they actually possess. We have all of us known eminent men, possessing in a very high degree the power of investigating Nature, who have been wholly unable to state clearly the knowledge they have themselves discovered. Great harm has been done to the cause of scientific culture by attempting to adapt the well-tried methods of literary scholarship to scientific subjects: for, as I have said in another place, competitive examinations are no test of real attainment in physical science.

Let me not be understood as disparaging the retentive memory and power of concentration which enable the student to reproduce acquired information with accuracy, rapidity, and elegance. This is a power of the very highest order, and is the result of the cultivation to a high degree of many of the noblest faculties of the mind. All I wish to enforce is, that success in such examinations is no indication of scientific culture, properly so called.

What, then, are the tests of true scientific scholarship? The answer can be made perfectly plain and intelligible. The real test is the power to study and interpret natural phenomena. As in classical scholarship the true test of attainment is the power to interpret the delicate shades of meaning expressed by the classical authors, so in science the true test is the power to read and interpret Nature; and this last power, like the other, can as a rule only be acquired by careful and systematic training. As some men have a remarkable facility for acquiring languages, so also there are men who seem to be born investigators of Nature; but by most men such powers can only be acquired through a careful training and exercise of the faculties of the mind, on which success depends. No man would be regarded as a classical scholar, however broad and extended his knowledge, if that knowledge had been acquired solely by reading English translations of the classical authors, however excellent. So, no man can be regarded as a scientific scholar whose knowledge of Nature has been solely derived from books. In either case the real scholar must have been to the fountain-head and drawn his knowledge from the original sources. In order, then, to discover how scientific culture must be gained, we