6 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



lead in doing, to form a committee of themselves and others to give an 

 intensive study to this problem for Canada, and formulate a national 

 curriculum of scientific education for the schools and colleges of the 

 land. It is through the rising generation that the hope for success 

 lies, and I do not believe there is any more important national work 

 that this national society can do than the making of a thorough survey 

 of our special defects and needs in scientific education, and the urging 

 of their conclusions on the educational authorities throughout the 

 country, for it is my own experience and the opinion of many of my 

 friends that science is badly and inadequately taught in Canada today. 

 If the war will force us to remedy that, it will have accomplished 

 another good end. It does not mean at all a new controversy or 

 struggle with the Humanities; there is room for all, if all are well done. 

 If every college fostered research and provided for it, and every student 

 were thus brought into actual contact with the living and growing 

 organism of science and felt its vivifying infection, the virus would be 

 carried by him into the school or into the workshop or on to the farm 

 or into the forest as a scientist, so that the idea of research would be 

 ever in his mind as an agent of final reference in all operations and 

 difficulties. Research would then come naturally into its own. 

 We must rid the minds of the average being of the wonder and admira- 

 tion and awe of science, which the popular magazine and newspaper 

 cater to, and substitute familiarity and commonplace and solid under- 

 standing. We do not and shall not ask for science in place of the liberal 

 arts, but science along with the other factors of the basis of knowledge 

 which goes to the acquiring of the true art of living. 



