BRAIN WORK AND MANUAL WORK. 197 



dozen of boxes, or the gross ; the metre, the centimetre, 

 the kilometre, and so on), is not impressed on the mind, 

 and therefore, when the children come to the decimal 

 fractions they are at a loss to understand them ; whereas 

 in France, where the decimal system of measures and 

 money is a matter of daily life, even those workers who 

 have received the plainest elementary education are 

 quite familiar with decimals. To represent twenty-five 

 centimes or twenty-five centimetres, they write " zero 

 twenty-five," while most of my readers surely remember 

 how this same zero at the head of a row of figures 

 puzzled them in their boyhood. We do also what we 

 can to render algebra unintelligible, and our children 

 spend one year before they have learned what is not 

 algebra at all, but a mere system of abbreviations, which 

 can be learned by the way if it is taught together with 

 arithmetic. 



The waste of time in physics is simply revolting. 

 While young people very easily understand the prin- 

 ciples of chemistry and its formulas, as soon as they 

 themselves make the first experiments with a few glasses 

 and tubes, they mostly find the greatest difficulties in 

 grasping the mechanical introduction into physics, 

 partly because they do not know geometry, and especi- 

 ally . because they are merely shown costly machines 

 instead of being induced to make themselves plain 

 apparatus for illustrating the phenomena they study. 

 Instead of learning the laws of force with plain instru- 

 ments which a boy of fifteen can easily make, they learn 

 them from mere drawings, in a purely abstract fashion. 

 Instead of making themselves an Atwood's machine 

 with a broomstick and the wheel of an old clock, or 

 verifying the laws of falling bodies with a key gliding on 

 an inclined string, they are shown a complicated appara- 

 tus, and in most cases the teacher himself does not know 

 how to explain to them the principle of the apparatus, 

 and indulges in irrelevant details. And so it goes on 



