HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUCTION. 381 



of Natural History. The professors were chosen from among the 

 most celebrated men of France, the sciences being represented by 

 Lagrange, Laplace, Haliry, Monge, Daubenton, and Berthollet. 



While there was this enormous progress abroad, represented 

 especially by the teaching of science in Germany and the teaching of 

 the teachers in France, things slumbered and slept in Britain. We 

 had our coal and our iron, our material capital, and no one troubled 

 about our mental capital, least of all the universities, which had be- 

 come, according to Matthew Arnold (who was not likely to 

 overstate matters), mere hauts lycees, and " had lost the very idea 

 of a real university " ; * and since our political leaders generally 

 came from the uuiversities, little more was to be expected from 

 them. 



Many who have attempted to deal with the history of education 

 have failed to give sufficient prominence to the tremendous dif- 

 ference there must necessarily have been in scientific requirements 

 before and after the introduction of steam power. 



It is to the discredit of our country that we, who gave the per- 

 fected steam engine, the iron ship, and the locomotive to the world, 

 should have been the last to feel the next wave of intellectual 

 progress. 



All we did at the beginning of the century was to found me- 

 chanics' institutions. They knew better in Prussia, " a bleeding and 

 lacerated mass "; f after Jena (1806), King Frederick William III 

 and his councilors, disciples of Kant, founded the University of 

 Berlin, " to supply the loss of territory by intellectual effort." 

 Among the universal poverty money was found for the Universities 

 of Konigsberg and Breslau, and Bonn was founded in 1818. As 

 a result of this policy, carried on persistently and continuously by 

 successive ministers, aided by wise councilors, many of them the 

 products of this policy, such a state of things was brought about that 

 not many years ago M. Ferdinand Lot, one of the most distinguished 

 educationists of France, accorded to Germany " a supremacy in sci- 

 ence comparable to the supremacy of England at sea." 



But this position has not been obtained merely by founding new 

 universities. To Germany we owe the perfecting of the methods of 

 teaching science. 



I have shown that it was in Germany that we find the first organ- 

 ized science teaching in schools. About the year 1825 that country 

 made another tremendous stride. Liebig demonstrated that science 

 teaching, to be of value, whether in the school or the university, 



* Schools and Universities on the Continent, p. 291. 



f University Education in England, France, and Germany, by Sir Rowland Bleunerhas- 

 sett, p. 25. 



