494 



NATURE 



[December i6, 1920 



while for those who have before them years for 

 continuous study the former method is to be com- 

 mended, with those who have but an hour or two 

 a week in which to quicken their scientific ap- 

 preciation a sound working- knowledge of a far 

 wider range of scientific phenomena, 'with a bear- 

 ing upon daily experience, can be gained under a 

 system which combines the workshop and the 

 laboratory than by the conventional text-book 

 treatment of science. 



Such is the problem before us, and a possible 

 solution, stated in their simplest terms. As re- 

 gards elementary education, the question is 

 settled so far as Governmental authority is con- 

 cerned by the requirement of the Act of 1918 that 

 every local education authority must make suit- 

 able provision for the practical instruction of older 

 children. If this practical instruction is to have 

 an educational significance beyond the mechanical 

 repetition of manipulative exercises, however use- 

 ful in themselves, then the illustration, the work- 

 ing out in concrete materials, of scientific princi- 

 ples or formulae must be the very basis. For the 

 older children in elementary schools, and also on 

 the industrial side of central schools, such a com- 

 promise between the laboratory and the workshop 

 is inevitable. In county boroughs and urban dis- 

 tricts, where large, well-equipped centres are pos- 

 sible, the laboratory and the workshop may be 

 separate rooms, provided that the intimate rela- 

 tion of one to the other is recognised, so that the 

 problem set and illustrated in the laboratory is 

 worked out at the bench, or, conversely, the pro- 

 cess employed in the workshop is dissected and 

 its principle revealed in the laboratory. 



This is precisely what is going on in the one new 

 type of school which has been evolved in this twen- 

 tieth century of ours. Junior technical schools are 

 very different from the preparatory trade schools or 

 pre-apprenticeship schools which they are gener- 

 ally supplanting. Their purpose is to give a 

 young person intending at sixteen to take up an 

 apprenticeship in some branch of the engineering 

 or building trades or professions, even archi- 

 tecture or naval architecture, not only a human- 

 istic training in English subjects (and, for the 

 brighter intelligences, in a foreign language), but 

 also a firm foundation in mathematics, in me- 

 chanical drawing, and in the abstract principles 

 underlying that branch of applied science popu- 

 larly known as "mechanics," on which they may 

 build their careers — some going no further than 

 to become the foremen of industry ; others, during 

 or at the end of their apprenticeship, proceeding 

 NO. 2668, VOL. 106] 



to university courses and becoming the Kelvins 

 and Moultons of the future. 



Even in the sphere of adult education which is 

 opening out before us there is scope for work on 

 these comparatively simple and unambitious lines. 

 The intelligent artisan who awakes to deficiencies 

 in his early education and is anxious to improve 

 his scientific equipment will often find the initia- 

 tion into natural philosophy easier by way of the 

 laboratory workshop than through the lecture ' 

 theatre and the merely experimental laboratory. 

 But here the argument must not be pressed too 

 far, for the greatest is he who is able on reaching 

 man's estate to venture into strange seas of 

 thought alone, and the man of science is great 

 who approximates to that higher and more 

 abstract ideal. 



Vitalism versus Mechanism. 



The System of Animate Nature: The Gifford Lec- 

 tures delivered in the University of St. Andrews 

 in the Years 191 5 and 1916. By Prof. J. .Arthur 

 Thomson. (In two volumes.) Vol. i. Pp. 

 xi-(-348. Vol. ii. Pp. v -I- 349-687. (London: 

 Williams and Norgate, 1920.) Price 305. net 

 two vols. 



THE subject of the Gifford lectures was in- 

 tended by the founder to be natural theo- 

 logy regarded as a natural science and treated, 

 just as astronomy or chemistry would be, with 

 entire freedom from any prepossessions whatever. 

 This rather difficult task has been attempted by 

 two biologists. Dr. Hans Driesch in 1907-8, and 

 Prof. J. Arthur Thomson in 1915-16. The first 

 of these lecturers tells us that he 'set out to follow 

 biology along its own path — that is, from its nine- 

 teenth-century " naive realism " towards its transi- 

 tion to "a branch of the philosophy of Nature," 

 and such a progress he accelerated in no small 

 degree by a method of treatment that was both 

 critical and constructive. It was critical inasmuch 

 as it included a penetrating analysis of the nature 

 of the transformations that occur in living sub- 

 stance, thus leading to the rejection of the notion 

 of a peculiar "vital energy form," and — which is 

 equally important — it involved also a thorough 

 criticism of the "pseudo-psychology" that had 

 been employed in the study of animal behaviour. 

 But it was also constructive in that it developed 

 an old concept — that of " entelechy " — deriving 

 from this a series of "psychoids" which were re- 

 garded as factors in organogenesis, metabolism, 

 and behaviour. The Drieschian psychoids are not 

 energetic agencies, but they function, as Leibnitz 



