1891 SCIENCE AND AGRICULTURE 



profound. However, there are some general principles which 

 apply to all technical training; the first of these, I think, is that 

 practice is to be learned only by practice. The farmer must be 

 made by and through farm work. I believe I might be able to 

 give you a fair account of a bean plant and of the manner and 

 condition of its growth, but if I were to try to raise a crop of 

 beans, your club would probably laugh consumedly at the result. 

 Nevertheless, I believe that you practical people would be all 

 the better for the scientific knowledge which does not enable 

 me to grow beans. It would keep you from attempting hope- 

 less experiments, and would enable you to take advantage of the 

 innumerable hints which Dame Nature gives to people who live 

 in direct contact with things. And this leads me to the second 

 general principle which I think applies to all technical teaching 

 for school-boys and school-girls, and that is, that they should 

 be led from the observation of the commonest facts to general 

 scientific truths. If I were called upon to frame a course of 

 elementary instruction preparatory to agriculture, I am not sure 

 that I should attempt chemistry, or botany, or physiology or 

 geology, as such. It is a method fraught with the danger of 

 spending too much time and attention on abstraction and theo- 

 ries, on words and notions instead of things. The history of a 

 bean, of a grain of wheat, of a turnip, of a sheep, of a pig, or 

 of a cow properly treated with the introduction of the ele- 

 ments of chemistry, physiology, and so on as they come in 

 would give all the elementary science which is needed for the 

 comprehension of the processes of agriculture in a form easily 

 assimilated by the youthful mind, which loathes everything in 

 the shape of long words and abstract notions, and small blame 

 to it. I am afraid I shall not have helped you very much, but I 

 believe that my suggestions, rough as they are, are in the right 

 direction. 



The perversion of the new Chair of English Literature 

 at Oxford to " Middle English " philology was the occasion 

 of the following letter, which appeared in the Pall Mall 

 Gazette of October 22, 1891 : 



I fully agree with you that the relation of our Universities 

 to the study of English literature is a matter of great public 

 importance; and I have more than once taken occasion to ex- 

 press my conviction Firstly, that the works of our great Eng- 

 lish writers are pre-eminently worthy of being systematically 

 studied in our schools and universities as literature ; and second- 



