Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/522

506 in the laboratory, put his opinions to the test; the result is invariably humility, for he finds that Nature has laws which must be discovered by labor and toil, and not by wild flights of the imagination and scintillations of so-called genius.

Those who have studied the present state of education in the schools and colleges tell us that most subjects, including the sciences, are taught as an exercise to the memory. I myself have witnessed the melancholy sight, in a fashionable school for young ladies, of those who were born to be intellectual beings reciting page after page from memory, without any effort being made to discover whether they understood the subject or not. There are even many schools, so called, where the subject of physics or natural philosophy itself is taught, without even a class experiment to illustrate the subject and connect the words with ideas. Words, mere words are taught, and a state of mind far different from that above described is produced. If one were required to find a system of education which would the most surely and certainly disgust the student with any subject, I can conceive of none which would do this more quickly than this method, where he is forced to learn what he does not understand. It is said of the great Faraday that he never could understand any scientific experiment thoroughly until he had not only seen it performed by others, but had performed it himself. Shall we, then, expect children and youth to do what Faraday could not do? A thousand times better never teach the subject at all.

Tastes differ, but we may safely say that every subject of study which is thoroughly understood is a pleasure to the student. The healthy mind as well as the healthy body craves exercise, and the school-room or the lecture-room should be a source of positive enjoyment to those who enter it. Above all, the study of nature, from the magnificent universe, across which light itself at the rate of 186,000 miles per second can not go in less than hundreds of years, down to the atom of which millions are required to build up the smallest microscopic object, should be the most interesting subject brought to the notice of the student.

Some are born blind to the beauties of the world around them, some have their tastes better developed in other directions, and some have minds incapable of ever understanding the simplest natural phenomenon; but there is also a large class of students who have at least ordinary powers and ordinary tastes for scientific pursuits; to train the powers of observation and classification let them study natural history, not only from books, but from prepared specimens or directly from Nature; to give care in experiment, and convince them that Nature forgives no error, let them enter the chemical laboratory; to train them in exact and logical powers of reasoning, let them study mathematics; but to combine all this training in one, and to exhibit to their minds the most perfect and systematic method of discovering the