3 1 8 Microscopy and some of its Uses. [Sess. 



things sufficiently plain to be seen and understood : while all 

 this extending of the relation between the ideal and its 

 embodiment leads up to wider conceptions of the unity and 

 community of things. We also learn that this thing we 

 call beauty existed apparently for millions of years before 

 there was a human eye to be delighted by it. 



As to the kind of objects to be studied I need say little. 

 Everything furnishes objects, and all kinds of objects possess 

 interest and yield mental improvement. In order to reach 

 the deepest interest and the most real knowledge of nature 

 we should, as far as possible, collect and prepare the objects 

 with our own hands. Personally, I like those objects best 

 which illustrate physiology, botanical and human, or which 

 lead up to a fuller knowledge of biology — a science which 

 towers above and utilises all the rest. In this way we see 

 that microscopic science, as by far the greatest aid to biology, 

 eminently tends to hunt dirt and disease and premature death 

 out of the world, to lift sanitation above the level of human 

 enactments and penalties and make good living voluntary, 

 and, by the general relief of human misery, to make the 

 world as good and happy a place as may be. 



In order to make a general estimate of the uses of the 

 microscope, we have only to remember that the changed and 

 improved educational method of the last thirty years was 

 chiefly initiated and formulated by an enthusiastic micros- 

 copist of great courage and literary power — by Huxley. But 

 we are only beginning to see the need of making the change 

 more thorough and extensive. We still need to draw the 

 distinction more strongly between learning and education. 

 A man may be educated without being learned, and he may 

 be learned without being educated. The blunders of history, 

 the rejections of discoveries and discoverers, have been mostly 

 committed by learned, and often highly learned, men. Our 

 education still needs to be far less a thing of books and far 

 more a thing of facts about the universe in which we live. 

 Instead of being educated, our minds have been so dissipated 

 by this over-reliance on books that there is often no meaning 

 behind what we read. The Greeks were surely an educated 

 people, and if so, it was chiefly due to contact with natural 



