58o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lished by the universities of England and of this country show that 

 this is the sole test of scientific scholarship on which most of these uni- 

 versities rely, in awarding their highest honors to students in physical 

 science. The power of so mastering a subject as to be able to repro- 

 duce any portion of it with accuracy, completeness, and elegance, at a 

 written examination, is the normal result of literary, not of scientific, 

 culture, and the power is of the same order, whether the subject- 

 matter be philology, literature, art, or science. Indeed, scientific are, 

 as a rule, much less adapted than literary subjects to the cultivation 

 of this power. Moreover, it is also true that scholars, having attained 

 to a very high degree of scholarship, may not possess this power of 

 stating clearly and concisely the knowledge they actually possess. 

 We have all of us known eminent men, possessing in a very high 

 degree the power of investigating Nature, who have been wholly 

 unable to state clearly the knowledge they have themselves discov- 

 ered. Great harm has been done to the cause of scientific culture 

 by attempting to adapt the well-tried methods of literary schol- 

 arship to scientific subjects : for, as I have said in another place, 

 competitive examinations are no test of real attainment in physical 

 science. 



Let me not be understood as disparaging the retentive memory 

 and power of concentration which enable the student to reproduce 

 acquired information with accuracy, rapidity, and elegance. This is 

 a power of the very highest order, and is the result of the cultivation 

 to a high degree of many of the noblest faculties of the mind. All I 

 wish to enforce is, that success in such examinations is no indication 

 of scientific culture, properly so called. 



What, then, are the tests of true scientific scholarship ? The an- 

 swer can be made perfectly plain and intelligible. The real test is the 

 power to study and interpret natural phenomena. As in classical 

 scholarship the true test of attainment is the power to interpret the 

 delicate shades of meaning expressed by the classical authors, so in 

 science the true test is the power to read and interpret Nature ; and 

 this last power, like the other, can as a rule only be acquired by care- 

 ful and systematic training. As some men have a remarkable facility 

 for acquiring languages, so also there are men who seem to be born 

 investigators of Nature ; but by most men such powers can only be ac- 

 quired through a careful training and exercise of the faculties of the 

 mind, on which success depends. No man would be regarded as a 

 classical scholar, however broad and extended his knowledge, if that 

 knowledge had been acquired solely by reading English translations of 

 the classical authors, however excellent. So, no man can be regarded 

 as a scientific scholar whose knowledge of Nature has been solely de- 

 rived from books. In either case the real scholar must have been to 

 the fountain-head and drawn his knowledge from the original sources. 

 In order, then, to discover how scientific culture must be gained, we 



