Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/186

174 up and keep before the mental vision a distinct image of the thing reasoned about. In fact, what is called the scientific imagination seems almost wanting in many minds until a severe course of training in science arouses the dormant faculty, and develops into the actual and the active what otherwise would have remained an unnoticed and neglected potentiality. The consequence is, that the teacher who depends on verbal statements alone can never be sure that the ideas so clear to himself are correct, if at all apprehended by his pupils, and that these are not increasing their ignorance rather than their knowledge. Many minds which seem to become sluggish, or to wither away when fed with what to them are the dry husks of words, are roused to activity and intelligence when they are directed to the study of things and the relations of things, when they are brought face to face, so to speak, with the actual phenomena of the world around and within them.

But before I pass from this let me point out that the guinea-and feather experiment, if successfully performed, is about as bad an example of an educative experiment as could well be selected. The bare fact to be observed would stand out too distinctly, too completely disentangled from other phenomena to give it any value in training the observing faculties of any but mere infants, while the inferences and deductions from the results of the experiment are too abstruse for any but those who have advanced some way in quantitative analysis of phenomena. Moreover, the mere experimental result can be obtained without any elaborate apparatus, while the deduced propositions can be, and in actual practice generally are, arrived at by simpler means. In truth, the experiment is not one which should be presented to the pupil in order to deduce from it that the earth's attraction depends, not on the nature of a body, but merely on its mass, but he should be skillfully led to suggest this experiment as a test of the truth of this proposition. In fact, it is an experiment of verification, not an experiment of discovery.

It was my intention, when I consented to address you on this subject, to present you with an outline of how actually to proceed in order to give children a systematic training in observation, selecting plants as the objects for examination. Botany has been called a science of mere names, and it must be confessed it has too often been presented as such; but, rightly treated, it offers a wide field and ample scope for observation of the forms, the positions, and the functions of the various parts of plants, of the relations of these parts to each other, and of their modifications and adaptations to varying conditions, as well as for many other observations just such as children in our primary classes are capable of making. But all, and more than all, I purposed doing, has been done and so well done by Miss Eliza A. Youmans, in her "First Book of Botany," that I believe it will be better to refer you direct to that work, rather than to enter on details here. If one