Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/651

Rh through failure to exercise them then that they suffer atrophy. The so-called science introduced into a few schools in answer to the persistent demands of its advocates has been in most cases a shallow fraud, of no value whatever educationally. Boys see oxygen made and things burned in it, which gives them much pleasure; but, after all, this is but the old lesson learning in an interesting shape, and has no superior educational effect. I would here repeat what I have recently urged elsewhere, that in the future all subjects must be taught scientifically at school, in order to inculcate those habits of mind which are termed scientific habits; the teaching of scientific method—not the mere shibboleths of some branch of natural science—must be insisted on. No doubt some branch of chemistry, with a due modicum of physics, etc., is the subject by means of which we may best instill the scientific habits associated with experimental studies, but it must be the true chemistry of the discoverer, not the cookery-book-receipt pseudo-form which has so long usurped its place. Whatever be taught, let me repeat that mere repetition work and lesson learning must give place to a system of allowing children to do things themselves. Should we succeed in infusing the research spirit into our teaching generally, then there will be hope that, in the course of a generation or so, we shall cease to be the Philistines we are at the present time; the education given in our schools will be worthy of being named a "liberal education" which it never will be so long as we worship the old world classical fetich, and allow our schools to be controlled by those who reverence this alone, having never been instructed in a wider faith.

As regards our college courses, I see no reason to modify the views expressed in my address to the Chemical Section of the British Association at Aberdeen in 1885; on the contrary, the experience I have since gained as a teacher and examiner has served only to strengthen them and to convince me of the paramount necessity of a very radical change in our system of instruction, and I rejoice at the increasing evidence of a state of unrest both at home and abroad. The "thorough" course of qualitative analysis which it has long been customary to impose at a very early period of the student's career must, I venture to think, be relegated to near its close; this course certainly has not the effect of producing competent analysts, and but too often reduces those who toil through it to the dead level of machines; in hundreds of cases I have seen students, as it were, hang up their intelligence on the clothes peg outside and enter the examination room masked with a set of analytical tables, through which alone they allow themselves to be actuated, and to which they render the blindest obedience. Qualitative analysis actually requires the fullest exercise of the mental faculties as well as considerable