Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/43

Rh chemical change'; on page 6, 'Molecules consisting of atoms of the same kind are termed elementary molecules, and substances whose molecules are so constituted are known as elements.' The numbers of the pages on which these statements occur are also significant. This reminds one of the methods of the old Greek philosophers, who pretended to solve all questions of science by pure deduction, positing some hypothesis, and then developing everything else by meditation in their closets, disdaining to disturb the order of their thoughts by experiments. But it is unworthy of the present age of inductive science, wherein every thought has, or should have, experimental evidence as its starting point. It can not be said that this particular author has made a false statement, but he has left the subject incomplete; cautiously reserving a loophole for his own escape, he fairly traps his readers. For it is inevitable that, with such didactic phraseology, and without having his attention called to the hypothetical, the tentative, nature of these definitions, the student should become convinced that the most fundamental facts of chemistry are that there are about eighty substances so simple that they can never be broken up into simpler things, and that all substances are composed of ultimate particles, called atoms, eternally indivisible.

A student started out with this hodgepodge of fact and theory thoroughly implanted in his mind as the basis for all his future knowledge is sadly handicapped, indeed he is intellectually maimed, and it may take him years to overcome the habit of confusing fact and theory, and to learn how to think straight; perhaps he never succeeds in overcoming it. This confusing of facts with theories is a vicious habit, which grows till it colors all one's thoughts, hinders the free play of the intellect, diminishes the power of right judgment and starts the ossification of the wits even before the age set by Dr. Osler.

It is not necessary to consider a student of chemistry as an infant in arms to be fed on predigested food. He may be assumed to have a digestive apparatus of his own. Give him the benefit of any doubt and ascribe to him at least a dawning intelligence, which, properly stimulated, may some day shed some light of its own. It is the characteristic course of a lazy teacher, and one pleasing to lazy students as well, to supply a lot of personal opinions in the shape of cut and dried definitions, so easy to memorize and, unfortunately, so hard to forget; phrases which do not require the intellect to bestir itself and exercise its faculty of criticism, to pass judgment for itself between alternative or conflicting views. Strictly speaking, nothing should be presented in the form of a definition except what is, in itself, a statement of experimental facts, as, for instance, we describe or define a unit of measurement in terms of other units. When dealing with a subject where more than one opinion is permissible, all should be stated, or at