Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/268

254 changes may occur in outward conditions, girls will always be, as they always have been, potential wives and mothers. The fact, however, remains that the charge of young and helpless humanity belongs by nature to women, and that much, if not all, of the well-being and happiness of children, both present and future, depends on their physical necessities being rightly understood. To a woman who lives her life under the domestic conditions which it is now unfortunately the thing to consider narrow, it is of little consequence whether she understands the principle of a Torricellian vacuum or the significance of the periodic law, but it means much both to her and to others that she should have a correct knowledge of the natural laws that govern physical well-being. This remark is of an old fashion, but the truth it contains is eternally new, and therefore it is not only strange, but sad, that the grace of the fashion of it should be in danger of perishing.

Scientific instruction, then, in girls' schools to-day is not carrying out the honorable intention with which it was introduced into education. The "crusade" spoken of by Matthew Arnold is indeed responsible for much of the harm he ascribes to it. But, just as Wilkes claimed that he had never been a Wilkesite, so the "gifted leaders" would probably be little in sympathy with much that is done in their name. It is only by conforming to their original conception of the purpose of scientific instruction that we can succeed in avoiding the rock of complete neglect of natural science, and at the same time escape falling into the whirlpool of injury to art and letters. From the former of these perils we have indeed been recently delivered, but the force of our recoil has been such that there seems at present some danger of our being swept into the latter.

One point remains upon which to comment in conclusion: it is essential to the success of any reform in scientific instruction that the movement toward it shall proceed from the general public as well as from the school authorities. I hope, and from certain signs of the times I believe, that an impulse in this direction is now stirring in the minds of both educators and parents. That the time is now ripe is indeed my excuse for the existence of this article, which it is hoped may offer some suggestions as to the cause of an educational difficulty that seems to be felt at present even more by parents than it is by educators. But it is of course only one of the many such difficulties that beset the close of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the whole question of girls' education has now become so complex that a conscientious father to-day must often be ready to echo the words of the old song in the Beggar's Opera:

 I wonder any man alive Should ever rear a daughter!"