5 o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in the laboratory, put his opinions to the test ; the result is invariably 

 humility, for he finds that Nature has laws which must be discovered 

 by labor and toil, and not by wild flights of the imagination and scin- 

 tillations of so-called genius. 



Those who have studied the present state of education in the 

 schools and colleges tell us that most subjects, including the sciences, 

 are taught as an exercise to the memory. I myself have witnessed the 

 melancholy sight, in a fashionable school for young ladies, of those who 

 were born to be intellectual beings reciting page after page from mem- 

 ory, without any effort being made to discover whether they under- 

 stood the subject or not. There are even many schools, so called, 

 where the subject of physics or natural philosophy itself is taught, 

 without even a class experiment to illustrate the subject and connect 

 the words with ideas. Words, mere words are taught, and a state of 

 mind far different from that above described is produced. If one were 

 required to find a system of education which would the most surely 

 and certainly disgust the student with any subject, I can conceiv r e of 

 none which would do this more quickly than this method, where he is 

 forced to learn what he does not understand. It is said of the great 

 Faraday that he never could understand any scientific experiment thor- 

 oughly until he had not only seen it performed by others, but had per- 

 formed it himself. Shall we, then, expect children and youth to do 

 what Faraday could not do? A thousand times better never teach the 

 subject at all. 



Tastes differ, but we may safely say that every subject of study 

 which is thoroughly understood is a pleasure to the student. The 

 healthy mind as well as the healthy body craves exercise, and the 

 school-room or the lecture-room should be a source of positive enjoy- 

 ment to those who enter it. Above all, the study of nature, from the 

 magnificent universe, across which light itself at the rate of 186,000 

 miles per second can not go in less than hundreds of years, down to 

 the atom of which millions are required to build up the smallest 

 microscopic object, should be the most interesting subject brought to 

 the notice of the student. 



Some are born blind to the beauties of the world around them, 

 some have their tastes better developed in other directions, and some 

 have minds incapable of ever understanding the simplest natural phe- 

 nomenon ; but there is also a large class of students who have at least 

 ordinary powers and ordinary tastes for scientific pursuits ; to train 

 the powers of observation and classification let them study natural 

 history, not only from books, but from prepared specimens or directly 

 from Nature ; to give care in experiment, and convince them that Na- 

 ture forgives no error, let them enter the chemical laboratory ; to train 

 them in exact and logical powers of reasoning, let them study mathe- 

 matics ; but to combine all this training in one, and to exhibit to their 

 minds the most perfect and systematic method of discovering the ex- 



