102 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS—SECTION D. 
culture. Being desirous of helping in the introduction of more 
scientitic and, therefore, of truer and more economical methods of 
cultivation than the primitive ones still so largely employed in 
the colonies, it appeared to me that one measure which would 
harmonise with the local conditions would be to offer prizes for 
agricultural science, to be competed for in the public schools. I 
found, however, that such a course would be useless. It was true 
that teachers were allowed to take the subject as one of the class 
subjects for the standard examinations, but the regulation was a 
dead letter. I was informed that the subject could not possibly 
be taught, because teachers could not be found who had any 
acquaintance with it. The cause of this neglect of so important 
a subject—one, too, which the Education Department had some 
desire to encourage—was easily discovered. The regulation for 
teacher’s certificates in New Zealand recognised a great,variety of 
subjects, many of them of a highly ornamental character, including 
Greek and Italian, but nowhere was the subject of agriculture, or 
science applied to agriculture, recognised. And yet the subject 
is one of fundamental importance, for a larger proportion of the 
population has need of a knowledge of the principles of agricul- 
tural science than of any other subject bearing upon human 
industries. 
So long as science is practically excluded from the examinations 
for teachers’ certificates and degrees, so long will it be impossible 
to introduce any real teaching of science into the schools. And 
T would remark here that it is necessary that the habits of obser- 
vation and inference from observation should be acquired whilst 
the mind is young and still in a plastic condition. It is said that 
one who desires to attain a complete mastery of the violin must 
begin to practise whilst still little more than an infant, or other- 
wise the joints and tendons of the hand stiffen so as to impede 
the necessary freedom of action. So it is with the sciences which 
deal with the observation of natural objects: the cultivation of the 
power of observation must commence before the mind stiffens into 
indifference from lack of use. The training of the future workers 
of this Association should then begin whilst they are at school. 
But the question is very far from being merely that of the 
acquisition of workers by this Association, The advancement of 
science is synonymous with human progress, and if the develop- 
ment of scientific training will add afew recruits to those who 
endeavour, by patient and laborious research, to penetrate further 
into the secrets of nature, it will add far more to the army of 
industrial workers who apply the knowledge already gained by 
scientific workers to the advancement of the social and material 
welfare of man. 
There is one impediment to the progress of scientific education 
in its early stages which this Association may do something to 
overcome. If any time is given to science in schools, the subject 
