638 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



" preparation for life " which shall really be " of use in the future 

 career." But for the very large majority, what is " of use in the 

 future career " is not Greek, any more than it is chemistry ; 

 except in so far as Smalls Greek is " of use " as a key to open 

 Oxford with. There are probably about the same number of 

 real chemists in this country now as there are real Grecians ; 

 of both the supply is regulated partly by the demand but 

 mainly by the success of real teachers in arousing real interest 

 in a real subject. But that " interest in reality " which is the 

 one thing " useful in the future career " is as rarely elicited by 

 Greek as by chemistry, when the conditions prescribe cram as 

 a makeshift for teaching. As Sir E. Ray Lankester has urged 

 very forcibly, 1 it was because " the study of Greek was the 

 study of science" and the surest guide then known to an 

 interest in realities, that it was properly made compulsory in 

 the Revival of Learning against enormous opposition from anti- 

 scientific obscurantists. Now "it is because the study of Greek 

 is no longer the study of science that Greek must cease to be a 

 compulsory subject." " Science must be taught independently 

 and of set purpose, without Greek and as a primary and com- 

 pulsory subject"; because "for the cultivation of the mind," 

 which is regarded by him no less than by his opponents as an 

 end in itself, "an initiation into the working of natural science 

 is as indispensable as an introduction to Greek literature." In 

 which commonsense view Sir E. Ray Lankester has been sadly 

 anticipated by Plato. 



It is worth noting, perhaps, at this point that modern modes 

 of studying Greek literature and Greek life are themselves the 

 result of applying to Greek subjects methods of inquiry which 

 were formulated and applied in the natural sciences two gene- 

 rations ago and are now being transferred, late and partially, to 

 human studies. And it is our neglect to train teachers destined 

 for classical schools in the methods of natural science which has 

 prolonged a pre-scientific age so disastrously in just those 

 places where it ought to have been earliest and most ruthlessly 

 curtailed. In the same way, the neglect to train teachers for 

 these schools, either in scientific methods of language-study or 

 in the modern art of language-teaching or indeed to require from 

 them any formal training for their profession at all, is a main 



1 In his address to the Association of Public School Science Masters, 

 Nineteenth Century, March 191 1. 



