58 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
of the way. It should make no difference whether an individ- 
ual went but a short distance along the route or whether the 
entire journey was completed. He should be given direct and 
immediate values for the time and effort spent. 
Other sciences have established the connection between the 
fundamentals of their subject matter and the daily lives of the 
people without material loss in scientific value, and I believe 
that botany will not longer lag behind in the process. 
THE NEED OF A MORE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE OF 
AND TRAINING IN CHEMISTRY 
W. A. Noyss, University or ILLINOIS 
Before we can discuss properly the place of chemistry or of 
any other science in a scheme of education we must have a basis 
in some true philosophy of education and back of that must be 
a sane philosophy of life. Very many of the present tendencies 
in High School education seem to imply that its primary pur- 
pose is to develop men and women who are money making and 
money spending machines and that life consists chiefly of the 
externals, food and drink, and clothing and recreation and ma- 
terial resources. The poet Tagore gives a quite different view 
—to him the ideal of life is not acquisiton, but realization and 
our greatest teacher has said, “The Kingdom of God is within 
you.” For three and a half years of terrible war, Germany has 
been fighting because the masses of her people have believed 
that she is surrounded by hostile nations which threatened to 
destroy her civilization and because her leaders believe, with 
some show of justification, that their civilization is the best in 
the world and that it is their duty to impose it on others. Our 
allies have been fighting that the principles of justice and 
humanity may not perish from the earth and they are slowly 
coming to see that international cooperation and mutual help- 
fulness are better than selfish national agerandizement. On 
both sides the nations of the world are demonstrating that they 
are Willing to sacrifice a million lives and the material accumu- 
lations of a generation for ideals which are of greater value 
than life tself. 
