Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/53

Rh ?and but thirty per cent to the other physical sciences. Schools sending up boys for competition naturally shun subjects which are dealt with so hardly and so heavily handicapped by the state.

Passing from learned or public professions to commerce, how is it that in our great commercial centers, foreigners—German, Swiss, Dutch, and even Greeks—push aside our English youth and take the places of profit which belong to them by national inheritance? How is it that in our colonies, like those in South Africa, German enterprise is pushing aside English incapacity? How is it that we find whole branches of manufactures, when they depend on scientific knowledge, passing away from this country, in which they originated, in order to ingraft themselves abroad, although their decaying roots remain at home? The answer to these questions is that our systems of education are still too narrow for the increasing struggle of life.

Faraday, who had no narrow views in regard to education, deplored the future of our youth in the competition of the world, because, as he said with sadness, "our school-boys, when they come out of school, are ignorant of their ignorance at the end of all that education."

The opponents of science education allege that it is not adapted for mental development, because scientific facts are often disjointed and exercise only the memory. Those who argue thus do not know what science is. No doubt an ignorant or half-informed teacher may present science as an accumulation of unconnected facts. At all times and in all subjects there are teachers without æsthetical or philosophical capacity—men who can only see carbonate of lime in a statue by Phidias or Praxiteles; who can not survey zoölogy on account of its millions of species, or botany because of its 130,000 distinct plants; men who can look at trees without getting a conception of a forest, and can not distinguish a stately edifice from its bricks. To teach in that fashion is like going to the tree of science with its glorious fruit in order to pick up a handful of the dry fallen leaves from the ground. It is, however, true that, as science-teaching has had less lengthened experience than that of literature, its methods of instruction are not so matured. Scientific and literary teaching have different methods; for, while the teacher of literature rests on authority and on books for his guidance, the teacher of science discards authority and depends on facts at first hand, and on the book of Nature for their interpretation. Natural science more and more resolves itself into the teaching of the laboratory. In this way it can be used as a powerful means of quickening observation, and of creating a faculty of induction after the manner of Zadig, the Babylonian described by Voltaire. Thus facts become surrounded by scientific conceptions, and arc subordinated to order and law.