Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/744

724 scientific training whatever. And such teachers are expected to teach a dozen subjects each, and therefore have no time to make good their defective preparation. Thus good teaching of science can not be expected, for streams do not rise higher than their sources. The only remedy for these conditions seems to lie in the gradual education of the people. A series of object-lessons, showing the difference between a good teacher and a poor one, is the most effective means of causing good work to be appreciated.

But taking things as they are, even with uneducated teachers and teachers crowded for time, fairly good work may be done by the use of good methods. A great deal will depend, not on the kind of books you use, but on the kind of books you avoid. Most of the current text-books of elementary zoölogy are simply pernicious so far as your purposes are concerned. Even if these books were well digested and accurate in their statements of fact, which is rarely the case, they are based on incorrect principles. They are not elementary but fragmentary in their character. It is a great mistake to suppose that, because a book is small and says very little about each one of the animals of which it treats, it is thereby rendered elementary. Fragments are not necessarily elements. A fragment of rock is as hard to digest as a bowlder. Elementary work in science should treat of but few things, but the impressions it leaves with the child should be very clear ones. The ideas derived from the common text-books are of the vaguest possible character. These books are the parasites, not the allies, of science. They bear the same relation to the progress of science that barnacles bear to the progress of a ship. If you keep clear of these, you can not go far astray. Let us recall the words of Agassiz to the publisher who tried to induce him to write a schoolbook on zoölogy:

"I told him," he said, "that I was not the man to do that sort of thing; and I told him, too, that the less of that sort of thing which is done the better. It is not school-books we want, but students. The book of nature is always open, and all I can do or say shall be to lead students to study that book, and not to pin their faith to any other." And at another time he said, "If we study Nature in books, when we go out of doors we can not find her."

The essential of method is that we allow nothing to come between the student and the object which he studies. The book or chart or lecture which can be used in place of the real thing is the thing you should never use. Your students should see for themselves, and draw their own conclusions from what they see. When they have a groundwork of their own observations, other facts can be made known to them as a basis for advanced generalizations, for the right use of books is as important as their misuse is pernicious; but work of this sort belongs to the university rather