538 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



BIOGKAPHY m THE SCHOOLS. 



By Professor DAVID E. MAJOR and T. H. HAINES, 



OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY. 



HP1IE study described in the following pages was suggested by Pro- 

 -*- fessor E. Eay Lankester's tribute to Huxley which, concludes, 

 'Ever since I was a little boy he (Huxley) has been my ideal and 

 hero.'* An instance of a scientist in the role of 'ideal and hero' to the 

 boyish imagination is rare enough to attract attention. How rare it is, 

 and how low a rank the scientist takes in the scale of heroes, because 

 of our faulty methods of education, will be indicated roughly by the 

 figures which follow. 



The study was planned originally to find out in a general way 

 the relative degree of familiarity which a given number of students (high 

 school and university) have with the names of military leaders, on the 

 one hand, and the names of great scientists, on the other. Or rather, 

 the aim was to get a quantitative statement of the degree to which 

 familiarity with the names of the world's great military leaders sur- 

 passes familiarity with the names of its great scientists. For it is an 

 every-day observation that the names of the former are on everybody's 

 lips and that those of the latter class of men are not widely known. 



When the tests reported here were actually given, the original plan, 

 which included only the two classes just named, was extended so as 

 to include eight other categories giving ten in all, as follows : 



1. English and American poets. 7. Occupations and industries funda- 



2. Statesmen. mental to modern life. 



3. Inventors. 8. Novelists. 



4. Scientists. 9. Artists, including painters, sculp- 



5. Orators. tors and musicians. 



6. Military leaders. 10. Greek and Roman writers. 



It will be noticed that with the exception of the first and last 

 groups there is no limitation as to time or place. 



The method followed was to ask the students to begin at a given 

 signal, e. g., the tap of a pencil, and write in three minutes the names 

 of all the English and American poets they could recall. At the end 

 of the first three minutes the second group, statesmen, was given, and 

 so on to the end of the list. In all, six hundred and fifty high school 

 and university students were tested on the ten classes named above. 



Table I. gives the number of students belonging to each high school 

 and university class tested, and the average number of each of the ten 



L. Huxley, ' Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley,' II., p. 447. 



