Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/678

656 evangelists and prophets") will fail. The world is not yet quite gone mad. Some of his poetry, particularly of his songs, will take a place among the treasures of our language; and his engraved designs will be always prized by connoisseurs in art; but his tardy apotheosis will go no farther. R. G. W.

The friends of educational improvement have just reason for encouragement in the unmistakable tendency of the time to give increasing consideration to science in the higher courses of instruction. For while, on the one hand, the great institutions now organizing, as well as many of the older establishments, are abandoning the traditional policy of pressing all students into one and the same line of acquisition, and are substituting the plan of elective courses, in which scientific attainment shall rank equal in honor with classical proficiency; on the other hand, men of authority and position in the scientific world are more and more turning their attention to the preparation of text books for school uses. So long as science held a subordinate place in the seats of learning, its literature was naturally much neglected, and the preparation of scientific school books, left to inferior men, was fast degenerating into a mere business of compilers; while the works produced were alike defective in the accuracy of their facts and principles and in the art of their presentation.

In conformity to this tendency. Prof. Huxley, of England, has interested himself in the subject of general education, and has produced an elementary text book of Physiology. This was as unexpected as it is gratifying. We have been accustomed to think of him as a man devoted inexorably to original research, disdaining all the vulgar applications of science to the arts of life—a kind of exclusive high-church savant who dredged the ocean, dissected polyps, lectured the British Association, fought Owen or defended Darwin in the interest of the purest abstractions. His recent acceptance of the Presidency of the London Workingmen's College, and his powerful inaugural address before that institution show that Prof. Huxley has a sympathetic side for all wholesome ameliorations and improvements, and the practical applications of knowledge to the service of daily life. His physiological text book originated in this spirit, and is a valuable contribution to the cause of popular education.

Science has been defined as truth capable of verification, in contrast to metaphysics, which propound doctrines that are incapable of being verified. But if the test and essential distinction of science be that its propositions are all capable of being decisively established or rejected, then the highest excellence of a scientific treatise, as such, must be the truthfulness, accuracy, and reliability of its statements. Speculation and conjecture, though, perhaps, to a certain degree unavoidable from the progressive nature of science, must, nevertheless, be rigorously distinguished from principles and laws which have passed into well-attested acceptance. Especially in a work which professes to be an exposition of the character and relations of phenomena in any branch of science, the value of the performance, must be in exact ratio to the certainty and accuracy of its statements. To a disciplined and high-toned scientist, like Huxley, this must needs be the all-essential attribute of a scientific text-book. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find in his remarkable preface of a dozen lines, this pointed statement of what the author holds to be his true function in its preparation:

Simply to play the part of a sieve may seem a very unambitious office to those who are accustomed to consider that the highest exploits of mind consist in ideal constructions and creations; but to those who think that the first great duty of a rational being is to understand the truth of the order of things in the midst of which we are placed, as a preparation for bringing