VT.] n % Siutm rrf gocrlcrmt, 119 



tors, that you must first know; and real knowledge in 

 science means personal acquaintance with the facts, be 

 they few or many. 1 



1 It has been suggested to me that theie words may be taken to imply 

 a discouragement on my part of any sort of scientific instruction which 

 does not give an acquaintance with the facts at first hand. But this is 

 not my meaning. The ideal of scientific teaching is, no doubt, a system 

 by which the scholar sees every fact for himself, and the teacher supplies 

 only the explanations. Circumstances, however, do not often allow of the 

 attainment of that ideal, and we must put up with the next best system 

 one in which the scholar takes a good deal on trust from a teacher, who, 

 knowing the facts by his own knowledge, can describe them with so much 

 vividness as to enable his audience to form competent ideas concerning 

 them. The system which I repudiate is that which allows teachers who 

 have not come into direct contact with the leading facts of a science to pass 

 their second-hand information on. The scientific virus, like vaccine lymph, 

 if passed through too long a succession of organisms, will lose all its effect 

 in protecting the young against the intellectual epidemics to which they are 



