Page:The Harveian oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians June 26, 1889 (IA b22361285).pdf/39

 latter become very valuable in the daily drudgery of professional life. They may possibly rise to the position of useful, eminent, and fashionable practitioners, but the scientific training through which they passed while in the schools did little more than interfere with the acquirement of that empirical knowledge which was the only thing their minds were competent to deal with.

There is great evil in enforcing scientific studies on the attention of the student who has but three or four years to devote to the acquirement of practical knowledge.

If by doing so you could make him love science and follow it, then, indeed, a glorious result might follow; but that is impossible. Men become labourers in science only from innate love of it but the privilege is for the few, and the student during his short stay in our schools should not be distracted from the acquisition of practical knowledge by the futile attempt to make him a scientific man.

If he possess the taste, he will follow science when he has left us; he will become one of those who can understand the results of the physicist and chemist, and perhaps, by labouring to advance