372 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUCTION.* 



By J. NORMAN LOCKYER, K.C.B., F. R. S. 



THE two addresses by my colleagues, Professors Judd and Rob- 

 erts-Austen, have drawn attention to the general history of our 

 college and the details of one part of our organization. I propose 

 to deal with another part, the consideration of which is of very great 

 importance at the present time, for we are in one of those educa- 

 tional movements which spring up from time to time and mold the 

 progress of civilization. The question of a teaching university in 

 the largest city in the world, secondary education, and so-called 

 technical education are now occupying men's minds. 



At the beginning it is imperative that I should call your atten- 

 tion to the fact that the stern necessities of the human race have been 

 the origin of all branches of science and learning; that all so-called 

 educational movements have been based upon the actual require- 

 ments of the time. There has never been an educational movement 

 for learning's sake; but of course there have always been studies 

 and students apart from any of those general movements to which I 

 am calling attention; still we have to come down to the times of 

 Louis Quatorze before the study of the useless, the meme inutile, 

 was recognized as a matter of national concern. 



It is perhaps the more necessary to insist upon stern necessity as 

 being the origin of learning, because it is so difficult for us now to 

 put ourselves in the place of those early representatives of our race 

 that had to face the problems of life among conditionings of which 

 they were profoundly ignorant: when night meant death; when 

 there was no certainty that the sun would rise on the morrow; when 

 the growth of a plant from seed was unrecognized; when a yearly 

 return of seasons might as well be a miracle as a proof of a settled 

 order of phenomena ; when, finally, neither cause nor effect had been 

 traced in the operations of Nature. 



It is doubtless in consequence of this difficulty that some of the 

 early races have been credited by some authors with a special love 

 of abstract science, of science for its own sake; so that this, and not 

 stern necessity, was the motive of their inquiries. Thus we have been 

 told that the Chaldeans differed from the other early races in hav- 

 ing a predilection for astronomy, another determining factor being 

 that the vast plains in that country provided them with a perfect 

 horizon. 



The first historic glimpses of the study of astronomy we find 



* An address delivered at the Royal College of Science on October 6, 1898. 



