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able now in all our important city high schools, and the education 
obtained there is vastly superior to that obtained in our universi- 
ties not so very long ago. We are going ahead. We have been 
going ahead in the right direction. We know that our world is 
in a crisis that demands all kinds of biological knowledge until it 
can get its head level again. We must, for example, have the 
correct idea of evolution in place of the false ideas of evolution 
that have been partly responsible for making such havoc in the 
last few years. 
The Chairman: [ should be very glad indeed to have any ques- 
tions asked, or any brief remarks made, and I am going to take 
the liberty, without consulting him in advance, of asking Pro- 
fessor Caldwell if he has anything to say in relation to this subject. 
Professor Caldwell: Mr. Chairman: When one more year has 
passed, it will be twenty-five years since I first taught high school. 
I have never been in a school since that time, of any sort, high 
school, university, college, or normal school, in which I did not 
have some relation to the teaching of biology. That is an evi- 
dence of the extent to which I believe in that subject. I believe in 
it thoroughly. If, however, we had time (as we have not), there 
are two or three questions which it seems to me it would be 
profitable for us to raise concerning this situation. It is about 
fourteen years since you, here in New York, were called upon to 
make a statement for your administrative officers concerning 
the place of biology in the public high school. At about that same 
time others interested in the whole science program, as you were, 
were making other statistics to try to find out if there was any 
more efficient way of teaching our science than we then had. I 
visited in one year, thirteen years ago, twenty-two schools in 
which experiments were being tried out in general science. I 
made careful records, and saw enough to make me think that it 
was perhaps wise to make further experiments in the reorganiza- 
tion of elementary science teaching, so as to secure a more ef- 
fective teaching of it. As I said before, there were at least 
twenty-two schools which I visited, and all of these seemed to 
have but one view, that of trying to make science more valuable 
to the pupil, and that was the most commendable thing about it. 
It has been particularly interesting to me to hear the discussions 


