SKETCH OF SIR LYON PLAYFAIR. 119 



allied to scientific or, at least, educational work and partly with poli- 

 tics, and pre-eminently tributary to the public good and to scientific 

 methods of administration was his work as President of the Civil- 

 Service Inquiry Commission of 1874, which resulted in the production 

 of the elaborate scheme for the reorganization of the civil service, 

 under the operation of which the British departmental administration 

 has attained its present condition of high integrity and efficiency. 



Pertinently to Sir Lyon Playfair's work in these lines. Lord Ray- 

 leigh, ex-president, said, in presenting him as its presiding oificer to 

 the Association at Aberdeen : " As a general rule, I should think that 

 the desertion of active scientific work for politics was a step in the 

 wrong direction ; but, when one considers the valuable work done by 

 Sir Lyon Playfair, the lucid manner in which he teaches our rather 

 uninstructive legislators, the great influence he commands, and the 

 valuable services he has rendered on many occasions, I feel that there 

 are exceptions to the rule." 



Professor Playfair's efforts have been unceasingly directed to pro- 

 moting the improvement of the standards of education, and the adop- 

 tion of more thorough and practical methods and objects in the teach- 

 ing of the elementary and higher schools. Presiding at a meeting of 

 a school-teachers' association in 1875, he referred to the subject of 

 compulsory education, which was gradually becoming universal in the 

 country, but which, he said, would be pure tyranny unless the educa- 

 tion in the schools was increased and its quality raised. Quantity was 

 all very good, but, unless quality accompanied it, there was not much 

 gained. " If it was to be said that children of thirteen or fourteen 

 years of age were merely to receive the same education as children 

 of eight years of age, compulsory education would be but tyranny. 

 Therefore, compulsory education involved higher education." 



Of the direction toward which that increased and higher educa- 

 tion should be pointed he made a clear and forcible statement in his 

 address before the Educational Section of the Social Science Congress 

 at Newcastle in 1870, when, having remarked that, " under our present 

 system of elementary teaching, no knowledge whatever bearing on the 

 life-work of the people reaches them by our system of state educa- 

 tion," and that " the mere tools of education are put into the hands 

 of children during their school-time without any effort being made to 

 teach them to use the tools for any profitable purpose whatever, so 

 they get rusty or are thrown away altogether," he unfolded his own 

 views of the methods that should be pursued. "Books," he said, 

 "ought only to be accessories, not principals. The pupil must be 

 brought in face of the facts through experiment and demonstration. 

 He should pull the plant to pieces and see how it is constructed. He 

 must vex the electric cylinder till it yields him its sparks. He must 

 apply with his own hand the magnet to the needle. He must see 

 water broken up into its constituent parts, and witness the violence 



