Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/216

206 if the teacher can not draw? The instinct of imitation in man is irresistible. Slovenly drawing on the blackboard—sufficient evidence of the teacher's imperfect information and inaccurate conception of facts, the nature of which he only thinks he understands—can do little more than raise a cold fog of suspicion in the class-room, by which the tender sprouts of learning must be either dwarfed or killed. But even slovenly diagrams are preferable to purchased ones, for whatever diminishes the dead-work of a teacher enervates his investigating and thereby his demonstrating powers, and lowers him toward the level of his scholars.

Were I a dictator, I should drive all teachers of science out into the great field of dead-work, force them to go through all the gymnastics of original research and its description, and not permit them to return to their libraries until their note-books were full of their own measurements and calculations, sketch-maps and form-drawings, severely accurate and logically classified, to be then compared with those recorded in the books. What teachers fail to keep in mind is this: that learning is not knowledge; but, as Lessing says: "Learning is only our knowledge of the experience of others; knowledge is our own." No man really comprehends what he himself has not created. Therefore we know nothing of the universe until we take it to pieces for inspection and rebuild it for our understanding. Nor can one man do this for another—each must do it for himself—and all that one can do to help another is to show him how he himself has morsellated and recomposed his small particular share of concrete nature, and inspire him with those vague but hopeful suggestions of ideas which we call learning, but which are not science.

My third proposition was, that an expert in practical science can command the respect and confidence of his professional fellows, and, through their free suffrages, build up his own reputation in the learned and business worlds, only in exact proportion to the amount of good dead-work to which he voluntarily subjects himself. For, although the most of it is necessarily done in secrecy and silence, enough of it leaks out to testify to his honest and diligent self-cultivation, ' and enough of it must show in the shape of scientific wisdom to make self evident the fact that he is neither a tyro nor a charlatan. More than once I have heard the merry jest of the Australasian judge quoted with sinister application to experts in science. When a young colleague, just arrived from England, asked him for advice, he answered, "Pronounce your decisions, but beware of stating your reasons for them." Many an ephemeral reputation for science has been begot by this shrewd policy; but the best policy to wear well is honesty, and honesty in trade means selling what is genuine, well made, and durable, and honesty in science means, first, facts well proved, and then, conclusions slowly and painfully deduced from facts well proved, in sufficient number and order of arrangement to exhaust alike the