584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



exercise of ingenuity in detecting allusions to what they are studying, 

 in remarks carelessly made by the instructor, to find out what his pet 

 ideas and theories are. And where is the instructor who is not 

 pleased to find his own favorite opinions ardently, and, as it seems, 

 independently indorsed even by a student ? 



Another difficulty is the almost universal habit which students 

 have of using technical or semi-technical terms which, in reality, con- 

 vey to them no idea whatever. They think they have comprehended 

 the thing when they christen it with a high-sounding name, and they 

 do not stop to ask themselves whether they understand what the name 

 means. Tlie student who called a hole in a cell-wall a bioplast was 

 quite pleased with his achievement until he was asked what a bioplast 

 was. The suggestion that a hole might, without any great violence 

 to the English language, be called a hole, was timely if not pleasing. 

 Evidently, for an educated man, the art of calling a spade a spade is 

 difficult to acquire. Day after day, one is obliged to ask students to 

 translate their lingo — I don't know what else to call it — into English. 

 Frequently they can not. At length they begin to see that they are 

 only deceiving themselves by using words which they do not compre- 

 hend to describe structures which they do not understand. It fre- 

 quently happens that, after a student has described an object under 

 the microscope in what he considers fine scientific language, he admits 

 that he does not understand the structure of the object at all, but, on 

 making him start over again, and describe it in plain English, he finds 

 that it all comes out clearly enough. It is evident, for instance, that, 

 so long as a student thinks he must call all round bodies in cells 

 nuclei, he will soon have such a stock of nuclei on hand that he Avill 

 be hopelessly confused, and the matter is not much improved if, as a 

 last resort, he indiscriminately calls some of his superfluous nuclei 

 vacuoles and others bioplasts. The tendency to use meaningless 

 words is not, by any means, confined to biological students, but, in a 

 laboratory where one is examining something definite, the evil should 

 certainly be checked by frequent demands for English translations of 

 verbose rubbish. 



In giving you a somewhat detailed account of my own experience, 

 gentlemen, I am probably saying nothing new to you. It is an old 

 story, and perhaps a monotonous one. If I have spent considerable 

 time in stating the difficulties in the way of college instruction, it is 

 because I see that we must first have a clear conception of what the 

 difficulties are before we can make any real progress. The most 

 serious obstacle, it seems to me, is not so much that boys are not 

 taught biology at school, as that they are not taught to observe, but 

 are, on the other hand, taught to memorize text-books, and to regard 

 education as the acquiring of facts in the most rapid and easiest way. 

 It is a mistake to suppose that he is the best teacher who gives the 

 most information in the shortest time with the smallest expenditure 



