VII SCIENCE AND ART AND EDUCATION 173 



cannot be settled until one has made up one's 

 mind about various other questions. 



All, then, that I have to ask for, on behalf of 

 the scientific j^eoiDle, if I may venture to speak 

 for more than myself, is that you should put 

 scientific teaching into what statesmen call the 

 condition of " the most favoured nation "; that is 

 to say, that it shall have as large a share of the 

 time given to education as any other principal 

 subject. You may say that that is a very vague 

 statement, because the value of the allotment of 

 time, under those circumstances, depends upon the 

 number of principal subjects. It is x the time, 

 and an unknown quantity of principal subjects 

 dividing that, and science taking shares with the 

 rest. That shows that we cannot deal with this 

 question fully until we have made up our minds 

 as to what the principal subjects- of education 

 ought to be. 



I know quite well that launching myself into 

 this discussion is a very dangerous operation; that 

 it is a very large subject, and one which is difficult 

 to deal with, however much I may trespass upon 

 your patience in the time allotted to me. But the 

 discussion is so fundamental, it is so completely 

 impossible to make up one's mind on these mat- 

 ters until one has settled the question, that I 

 will even venture to make the experiment. A great 

 lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former age 

 — I mean Francis Bacon — said that truth came out 



