RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO THE PUBLIC WEAL. 45 



and but thirty per cent to the other physical sciences. Schools send- 

 ing up boys for competition naturally shun subjects which are dealt 

 with so hardly and so heavily handicapped by the state. 



Passing from learned or public professions to commerce, how is it 

 that in our great commercial centers, foreigners — German, Swiss, 

 Dutch, and even Greeks — push aside our English youth and take the 

 places of profit which belong to them by national inheritance ? How 

 is it that in our colonies, like those in South Africa, German enter- 

 prise is pushing aside English incapacity ? How is it that we find 

 whole branches of manufactures, when they depend on scientific 

 knowledge, passing away from this country, in which they originated, 

 in order to ingraft themselves abroad, although their decaying roots 

 remain at home ? * The answer to these questions is that our systems 

 of education are still too narrow for the increasing struggle of life. 



Faraday, who had no narrow views in regard to education, de- 

 plored the future of our youth in the competition of the world, be- 

 cause, as he said with sadness, " our school-boys, when they come out 

 of school, are ignorant of their ignorance at the end of all that edu- 

 cation." 



The opponents of science education allege that it is not adapted for 

 mental development, because scientific facts are often disjointed and 

 exercise only the memory. Those who argue thus do not know what 

 science is. No doubt an ignorant or half-informed teacher may pre- 

 sent science as an accumulation of unconnected facts. At all times 

 and in all subjects there are teachers without iesthetical or philosophi- 

 cal capacity — men who can only see carbonate of lime in a statue by 

 Phidias or Praxiteles ; who can not survey zoology on account of its 

 millions of species, or botany because of its 130,000 distinct plants ; 

 men who can look at trees without getting a conception of a forest, 

 and can not distinguish a stately edifice from its bricks. To teach in 

 that fashion is like going to the tree of science with its glorious fruit 

 in order to pick up a handful of the dry fallen leaves from the ground. 

 It is, however, true that, as science-teaching has had less lengthened 

 experience than that of literature, its methods of instruction are not 

 so matured. Scientific and literary teaching have different methods ; 

 for, while the teacher of literature rests on authority and on books for 

 his guidance, the teacher of science discards authority and depends 

 on facts at first hand, and on the book of Nature for their interpre- 

 tation. Natural science more and more resolves itself into the teach- 

 ing of the laboratory. In this way it can be used as a powerful means 

 of quickening observation, and of creating a faculty of induction after 

 the manner of Zadig, the Babylonian described by Voltaire. Thus 

 facts become surrounded by scientific conceptions, and are subordi- 

 nated to order and law. 



* See Dr. Perkins's Address to the Society of Chemical Industry. — " Nature," August 

 6, 1855, p. 333. 



