THINGS ESSENTIAL TO BOTANICAL TEACHING 55 



There are some principles of scientific education 

 not yet everywhere understood as they should be, and 

 the first of these is the absolute necessity for laboratory 

 instruction and the almost worthlessness of book work 

 alone. To try to realize the value of scientific study 

 from books without laboratory work would be, as I have 

 before said, like trying to derive the advantages of 

 a European tour from the reading of guide-books, or 

 the effort to form close friendships through corre- 

 spondence, comparisons which the teacher may well 

 use in answer to those who doubt the necessity for 

 laboratory work. 



Again, it is often maintained that a chief object of 

 scientific study is to increase a love of nature, or to 

 produce a greater reverence for the works of the Cre- 

 ator. On the contrary, its objects are utterly different. 

 If these things follow incidentally, so much the better, 

 but they are not a leading object. All scientific teach- 

 ing should be, first of all, as clearly cut, distinct, logical, 

 statistical as possible, and anything permitting haziness 

 of ideas should be rigidly excluded. Its object is to 

 help to train the intellect to be, as Huxley puts it, " a 

 clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal 

 strength, and in smooth working order." For -these 

 reasons I think that both poetry and religion should 

 be kept out of scientific laboratories. In the first place 

 a large proportion of the poetry introduced by teachers 

 and taken up by pupils is false in sentiment and of a 



