676 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



PEOGEESS OF HIGIIEE SCIEKCE-TEACHIXG. 



By W. H. stone, 

 lecturer on physics at st. thomas's hospital. 



IT is doubtful whether the generality of well-educated men fully 

 appreciate the great, the radical, and the almost revolutionary 

 change which has in the past thirty or forty years come over the 

 scope and spirit of English liberal education. Indeed, it can hardly be 

 termed a change ; but might be more correctly designated as a sub- 

 stitution of one branch of human knowledge for another. For, where- 

 as, in the first forty years of the present century, the dead languages, 

 especially Latin and Greek, history, logic, and metaphysics, fairly held 

 their own against the computative sciences of mathematics, mechanics, 

 physics, and chemistry, and the systematic or classificatory subjects of 

 botany, geology, and zoology as topics of teaching and examination, 

 they seem at the end of the second forty to have been all but super- 

 seded. No doubt in the main the revolution, great as it undoubtedly 

 is, has proved salutary. Englishmen, with their characteristic tenaci- 

 ty of existing forms, had retained all but unchanged in their large 

 public schools and in the older universities a form of intellectual cult- 

 ure which really originated in the middle ages, or at the latest with 

 the restoration of learning. This is no mere figure of speech. The 

 writer of the present remarks took his first childish lessons, after mas- 

 tering the rudimentary arts of reading and writing, from " The Boke 

 of Eoger Ascham," and received his first rewards for saying, parrot- 

 like by rote, the ancient farragos now only known by their initial 

 words ^^ Propria quae, mar thus, '''* " Quce genus,'''' and " As in prmsenti!''' 

 Of the present generation, not one in a thousand has ever even heard 

 of these mediaeval aide-memoires, or of the somewhat more useful 

 scholastic scheme of syllogisms, beginning with the cabalistic formula, 

 " Barbara Celarent." Later on, he and his companions were expected 

 weekly to manufacture, nolentes volentes, a certain quantity of poetry ! 

 God save the mark ! in the Latin and Greek tongues. He can 

 well remember his father's remonstrance on finding him working at 

 " that nasty chemistry, when you have not done your Latin verses." 

 Perhaps the most singular travesty of teaching was the inculcation of 

 that laboriously useless heap of conflicting rules termed the " Greek 

 accents." It was well known to every scholar that they were non- 

 existent in classical times ; that they were probably prosodiacal ; that 

 they sprang up about the time when Greek was going out of use as a 

 spoken language ; and that, except in very few instances, they now 

 served no purpose whatever. In spite of this, they were steadily and 

 perseveringly thrust down the throats of schoolboys, insomuch that 



