wooi.hi-ll] PHYSICAL NATURE-STUDY 7 



an age of machinery. It is safe to conclude that the public 

 will insist upon the children receiving instruction in physics 

 which is the science of machinery. Life is fast becoming em- 

 barrassing to those who are unable to understand and to use 

 machines. Automobiles, motor boats, electrical appliances of all 

 sorts and countless instruments of applied physics have done and 

 will do more than all the school men can toward shaping our 

 future courses of study in science. It is only a few years that 

 we have dwelt together in great cities. We used to drink from 

 family wells, with impunity. We must now have elaborate and 

 enormously expensive water systems. New York City is forced 

 to plan for an outlay of $160,000,000 to get water, and this 

 involves more problems in applied physics than the building of 

 the Panama canal. Our citizens need to be well informed upon 

 these matters before giving their support. 



The gas supply, the milk supply, the pure food supply, heat- 

 ing and ventilation, production and uses of electricity all make it 

 essential that the ordinary citizen should be instructed in phys- 

 ics and chemistry, and these subjects are not beyond the capac- 

 ities of grammar school pupils except as we make them so. 



J. J. Thompson in his presidential address before the Brit- 

 ish association last summer, said: "I think a famous French 

 mathematician and physicist was guilty of only slight exagger- 

 ation when he said that no discovery was really important or 

 properly understood by its author unless and until he could 

 explain it to the first man he met in the street". When we claim 

 that physics cannot be taught to children we disagree with 

 Faraday and perhaps show that we do not properly under- 

 stand either physics or children. 



There will be no such thing as a private dwelling house in 

 New York City in the future. We are all moving into apart- 

 ment houses — great community dwellings. A modern apart- 

 ment house is a complete physical laboratory, or better a ma- 

 chine shop, and each inhabitant must understand most of it, 

 otherwise he will be ridiculed for his greenness or condemned 

 and ostracised for his ignorance. A rich and valuable course of 

 instruction might be built upon the following list of physical 

 appliances: Furnaces and boilers, blowers, dynamos, motors, 

 pumps, filters, water meters, gas meters, electric meters, plumb- 

 ing equipment, hydraulic or electric elevators, appliances for 

 cooking by gas or electricity, ingenious devices to be found 



