4 STUDIES IN ADVANCED PHYSIOLOGY. 



best of all, he is acquiring new facts in the way lie will be 

 obliged to acquire them when he leaves the school, and 

 when there will no longer be a teacher to diagram every 

 difficulty on the board in colored crayons, and when the 

 student will no longer be carried each day ' ' three pages in 

 advance." 



By making his own actual observations on actual tan- 

 gible material he is not only training his powers of observa- 

 tion which are directly concerned, but by the care required 

 to verify his observations, and by strict reasoning of the 

 mind to properly interpret his observations, he is developing 

 all those faculties of mind which are required in the acqui- 

 sition of any new truth. He will learn what it often costs 

 to make but one point, he will see what painstaking efforts 

 it frequently requires to establish but one new fact, and he 

 will not be discouraged when later on he finds it hard to 

 make progress. He will know that to learn but one point 

 as it ought to be learned is making more real progress than 

 to have many poured into him. He will have somewhat of 

 a criterion by means of which to gauge his own pace. It 

 is certainly an attitude of mind brought about by scientific 

 study not to accept too quickly what seems still unproved, 

 be it from the assurances of the patent-medicine quack to 

 the politician with his latest schemes on finance. Huxley 

 compared knowledge with the virus of vaccination. When 

 the virus is fresh, when it comes directly from its original 

 source, it is wonderfully potent, but passed through the 

 tissues of other animals it is gradually weakened and may 

 finally have no effect at all. So knowledge gained first- 

 hand, from the objects themselves, from the experiments 

 themselves, is wonderfully potent, but passed through the 

 tissues of several text-books or handed down through several 

 teachers, it is gradually weakened until finally when it is 

 administered it is too weak to save us from the intellectual 

 epidemics of the day. 



