yune 29, 1876] 



NATURE 



189 



Gill as a genus of Tapirs, and adopts Dr. Gray's multitu- 

 dinous division of the well-defined and eminently natural 

 group of Eared Seals {Otaria). Many naturalists would 

 hesitate before following Mr. Gill and Dr. Gray as authori- 

 ties on these (or perhaps we may add on many other) sub- 

 jects. But such and similar errors on questions of detail 

 do not, we believe, affect the validity of Mr. Wallace's 

 general conclusions. After the miserable stuff usually 

 thrust before us in even the best and most recent treatises 

 on geography, when the question of distribution comes 

 to be touched upon, it is truly refreshing to turn to Mr. 

 Wallace's broad and enlightened views on this subject. 

 Future compilers of geographical manuals will have an 

 easy task when they come to this most important but 

 hitherto most ill-used part of their work, if they will only 

 cast aside all that they have previously written, and 

 borrow freely from the volume now before us. 



Mr. Wallace has already registered many claims on 

 the gratitude of naturalists present and future. In their 

 interest he has explored the tropics of the east and the 

 wildernesses of the west, and has brought home number- 

 less novelties. He has written one of the best and most 

 instructive books of naturalists' travels ever yet issued. 

 He was, as is well known, the joint inventor with Mr. 

 Darwin of the theory of " Natural Selection." But 

 beyond all these scientific feats — and they are no mean 

 ones — he has accomplished a task that will extend his 

 fame even more widely amongst those who love science, 

 as the author of the first sound treatise on zoological 

 geography. 



TWINING'S " SCIENCE MADE EASY" 

 Science Made Easy : a Series of Familiar Lectures on the 

 Elements of Scientific Knowledge most Required in 

 Daily Life. By Thomas Twining. (London : Chapman 

 and Hal), 1876.) 



THESE thin clearly printed quartos represent a re- 

 markable experiment ; an attempt to diffuse good 

 teaching without good teachers, and to reproduce first- 

 rate popular lectures without the need of multiplying 

 skilled lecturers to deliver them. The author, Mr. 

 Twining, constructed in 1856 an Economic Museum at 

 Twickenham, which exhibited illustrations of scientific 

 knowledge as applicable to the concerns of daily life. 

 After fifteen years of continuous improvement this collec- 

 tion was destroyed by fire ; but the experience gained in 

 working it strongly impressed upon its author the convic- 

 tion that the level of popular culture in this country is 

 below the point at which intelligent appreciation of the 

 simplest scientific object becomes possible ; since his fine 

 museum, with its methodical classification, its careful 

 explanatory labelling, and the oral instruction of its active 

 curator, failed to convey knowledge to the mass of visitors, 

 to whom the very alphabet of science was unknown, and 

 whose minds were untrained to the reception of the 

 simplest truths. It is a bold thing for one man to enter 

 on the task of educating a people ; but Mr. Twining's 

 enthusiasm was equal to the attempt. Precluded himself 

 from lecturing, he prepared carefully-written lectures, 

 founded on his Twickenham experience, and entrusted 

 them to others to deliver. The swimming bath of East 

 Lambeth, dry and unused in the winter, was fitted up as 

 a lecture-room, and a course of five lectures was there 



delivered to attentive audiences of more than a thousand 

 persons. Demands for their repetition arose from all 

 parts of London ; and during the last nine seasons they 

 have been delivered in various mission-rooms, institutes, 

 and clubs of the working-classes to crowded and eager 

 hearers. Uneducated learners, however respectfully 

 attentive, yet carrying away from a lecture ideas crude 

 and disjointed, may lapse within a few days into their 

 original ignorance ; Mr. Twining therefore began early 

 to test his audiences by a system of examinations, so 

 modified as to meet the inexperience of candidates and 

 the elementary character of the teaching. Examination 

 programmes were issued, containing a full set of possible 

 questions on the course, from ten to fourteen being 

 allotted to each lecture, with the understanding that from 

 every one of these groups two questions would be selected 

 by the examiner ; while a preliminary examination " of a 

 friendly kind " struck off all who were clearly incapable 

 of presenting themselves with any prospect of success. 

 Under these limitations we are told that a large number 

 of candidates have obtained prizes and certificates at 

 successive examinations, their papers showing that they 

 had grasped and could reproduce intelligently a fair 

 amount of the teaching which they had received. 



Mr. Twining thinks that what has been done in Lon- 

 don may easily be done elsewhere ; he therefore prints 

 his lectures, and prefaces them with minute instructions 

 for the guidance of such amateurs as may wish to 

 organise and carry out the course. In its delivery two 

 persons are necessary, a " reader " and a " demonstrator." 

 The reader must be a good elocutionist, and need be 

 nothing more ; need know nothing of science in general, 

 nothing of the particular science on which he is discours- 

 ing. If he is clever enough to introduce here and there 

 a happy local d, propos, so much the better ; but he is a 

 mere vehicle for the transmission of the matter contained 

 in his text, and is not required to do more than utter it. 

 The demonstrator must know something of science, and 

 have some practice in manipulation ; but the simplicity 

 of the experiments and the fulness of the printed direc- 

 tions reduce this necessity to a minimum, so that the 

 author proposes to himself as suitable interpreters in a 

 country town the national schoolmaster as reader, and 

 the doctor or dispensing chemist as demonstrator. Refer- 

 ence numbers, dotted lines, and other devices, indicate 

 the relative duties of the two performers, who cannot of 

 course expect to work smoothly and in concert without 

 repeated and laborious rehearsals. 



The ordinary science teacher, luxuriating in abundant 

 time, in ample apparatus, and in educated hearers, might 

 be tempted to speak unfavourably of the lectures them- 

 selves, as too condensed for practical usefulness. He 

 might say, and say truly, that the matter contained in the 

 three lectures on Mechanical Physics could scarcely, by a 

 master teaching boys, be included in the five-and-twenty 

 lectures of an ordinary school term ; that the two lectures 

 on Chemistry are overgrown object lessons ; that no one 

 of the seventeen topics treated in the single lecture on 

 Chemical Physics would demand less than an hour's 

 careful teaching in a class-room ; and that the " ques- 

 tionary," or examination programme, represents pure and 

 simple cram. But such criticism would be wholly unfair 

 applied to Mr. Twining's enterprise, as overlooking its 



