Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/406

392 more nearly. Based on actual experience, the methods now prevalent in sciences are inductive, and call for experimental work as indispensable. Scientific knowledge of to-day may be said to begin its inquiries with an experiment, and to prove the correctness of its conclusions by another. A facility of manipulation, therefore, the aptitude for laboratory work is all-important, and this may be found by analysis not to be the result, as it is often popularly accepted, of natural or inborn talent, etc., but to represent a special training, a special knowledge, thus:

1. We expect a well-developed perceptive power in the senses, delicacy of touch, a minutely trained eye, ear—yes, even nose.

2. A steadiness of purpose, and a patience understood only by those who have worked on the same problem repeatedly and unsuccessfully, often for weeks, before they could obtain the desired results.

3. A synthetic initiative in putting things together, a laboratory intuition, so to speak, which, like any other intuition, merely represents an unconscious storage of the data of numerous antecedent trials and attempts.

4. A knowledge of the nature of materials employed, say those that we may justly call materials of construction.

5. Knowledge of the elementary laws in sciences, some mechanics, some chemistry, to be afterward supplemented by the adequate systematic study of mathematics and the philosophical analysis of theories.

Such, in short, are the prerequisites for a modern scientific apprenticeship, and such a preparatory training, both in knowledge and manipulation or practical work, is expected to result from the innovation recommended—the industrial training or the experimental laboratory connected with every technical fitting-school.

Within the writer's memory, instruction in sciences has been entirely revolutionized in its methods. It was suffering from the traditional scholasticism and its influence, modernized into that terrible bugbear the classical languages. Definitions learned by rote used to mark the first hard steps of the embryo engineer, geologist, or chemist, etc. Definitions numbered by the hundred then, of which very few have withstood the test of time, most of them having vanished with Torricelli's vacuum theory, etc.

A boy might then have had all the qualifications that we would look for to-day for a future scientist. He might have had a deep interest in any mechanical contrivance—for instance, taken watches apart and put them together, picked out all the needles out of his mother's drawer with a magnet, have been enthusiastic about a horse-power, say a thrashing-machine, or have successfully, although with some slight mishap, tried the properties of gunpowder, of sulphur, of phosphorus. The little fellow may have