4 2o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



no organising capacity ; they lack ideas and ideals ; the lessons 

 of history — of classical history especially — are lost upon them. 

 Classical training is supposed to be of value as leading to an 

 appreciation of the meaning of words. I would challenge Dr. 

 Chilton to ask himself if his words have any real meaning. I 

 would challenge him to prove that he has real knowledge of, 

 nay, even the will and power to appreciate, the possibilities 

 before the modern teacher whose vision is not entirely obscured 

 by classical spectacles. 



On reading what Dr. Chilton had said, I could not help 

 feeling that his attitude was far less satisfying than Mr. David's, 

 but I admit I was under Dr. Gray's hypnotic influence. And 

 I had once read Hazlitt's essay " on the Ignorance of the 

 Learned." 



I had in mind, too, a Friday-evening discourse delivered at 

 the Royal Institution in 1868 by the late Dean Farrar when a 

 classical master — therefore one of the elect — at Harrow School. 

 Farrar did not hesitate to damn the literary system out and out. 



" So far from being half finished, the real battle for educa- 

 tional reform has hardly begun. Latin and Greek still continue 

 to be the all but exclusive staple of our education, and though 

 a classical training conducted on wise principles and with 

 reasonable methods is of the highest value, yet the many and 

 serious evils which our present system of it involves have been 

 resolutely ignored. The yoke of the Greek and Latin languages 

 has been made needlessly humiliating and needlessly heavy; taken 

 alone, it is doubtful whether they furnish the best mental dis- 

 cipline for any but certain that they do not furnish even a good 

 discipline for all, and they remain to this day entrenched behind 

 a mountain-heap of fallacies, of which no small number ought 

 to have been banished ignominiously to the region of the most 

 exploded errors. . . . 



" The question then is, not whether the education is to be 

 literary or scientific but whether it is to be scientific or nil ; 

 the struggle is not between science and literature but between 

 something and nothing, between science and no science, between 

 intellectual culture and its almost total absence." 



This opinion, be it noted, was given more than forty years ago ! 

 There came also into my memory the confessions made in 

 the Upton Letters, issued from a not unknown school on the 

 banks of the Thames, it will be remembered ; I since find in the 

 letter of July 16, 1904, in which T. B. writes to his confidant : 



