Natural Science 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress 



December 1899 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



Eliminated. 



It is one of the conditions of continued vigorous activity on an 

 organism's part that income be at least equal to expenditure, and the 

 same is true of journals. To try to sustain the activity when the 

 aforesaid condition is not fulfilled is not uninteresting, but there are 

 limits to the possibility of continuing it. We regret to say that we 

 have reached these limits as regards Natural Science, of which this is 

 the last number, so far as we are concerned. In spite of generous 

 support from many during the past year, and our own endeavours in 

 publishing and editing, the journal has not reached that measure of 

 success which would seem to us to warrant another year's experiment. 

 We make our bow, then, to the process of natural elimination. 



Nature Studies. 



There has been much talk of late concerning nature-studies and their 

 more forcible introduction as part of school-education. On the one 

 hand we hear the conservatism of those who think that education had 

 much better continue " on the old lines," that is, without any regulated 

 instruction regarding our natural environment except in so far as that 

 means man and his many inventions. The proper study of mankind, 

 they say, is man, forgetting that he does not live in vacuo, and is really 

 unintelligible apart from his non-human environment. On the other 

 hand we hear the enthusiasm of those who think that there is a new 

 panacea for the ills of minds and morals in a codified system of scientific 

 teaching. To any one who is acquainted with the rudiments of the 

 rapidly advancing art of paedagogics or possessed of unbiassed common- 

 sense, the two extreme positions seem absurd, the practical problem 

 being to work our way towards a teaching of the humanities which 

 will be scientific, and a learning of science which will be humanitarian. 



26 NAT. SC. VOL. XV. NO. 94. 38 I 



