VI 



Supplement to Nature, March 21, 1 90 1 , 



it is by education alone, the education of the whole 

 people, that such improvement can take place. Educated 

 young people will so select partners that the stock will 

 rapidly improve, and the improved stock will ask for 

 better education still. What governor, however scientific, 

 can so direct the choice of millions of different people as 

 they themselves can if properly educated ? for each case 

 needs not only special scientific study, but something very 

 much outside what we usually call science. 



Whatever the stock, the author thinks — as we do — that 

 it is only by education in scientific schools that, in a par- 

 ticular generation, a particular nation is made able to 

 compete with other nations either in the arts of war or 

 of peace. 



Unfortunately, he leaves us in great doubt as to what 

 he means by a scientific school.. Over and over again he 

 attacks the technical schools, which in this country are 

 getting to be so numerous and which are improving in 

 their methods every year. We feel sure that he cannot 

 have studied this matter. He seems to think that the 

 numerous great technical schools rrterely teach trade 

 tricks and trade skill and trade formulae. There are 

 technical schools attached to all the great colleges and 

 universities. There are the technical colleges of the City 

 and Guilds of London Institute. He will find that in all 

 these, students are instructed through experiment, through 

 their own observation and through mathematical deduc- 

 tion, in those scientific principles which underlie their 

 future profession. The wail of the teacher in such classes 

 is always that his pupils have been so badly taught at 

 school that they cannot observe, they cannot think for 

 themselves, they cannot reason, they cannot even express 

 themselves on paper ; what they have learnt as mathe- 

 matics is in no sense a part of their mental machinery and 

 cannot be used in reasoning. The author says that for 

 sixteen years he has himself been helping to train en- 

 gineers, and he describes how he endeavours to make his 

 students observe and think for themselves. And does 

 not every teacher of mathematics or applied mathematics 

 to engineers at all the other technical schools in the 

 country try to do the same ? Has he any kind of proof 

 that they do not ? It is quite true that at some colleges 

 the teacher may have been badly selected, selected 

 merely because he took a good place in the mathematical 

 tripos, a man with no liking or aptitude for teaching ; 

 but we beg to assure Prof Pearson that such men are the 

 exception, and not the rule, at the technical schools with 

 which we are acquainted. Unfortunately, at all these 

 colleges the teachers find many, or indeed most, of 

 their pupils unprepared for the higher, more com- 

 plex work which some years hence will, we hope, really 

 be taken up by all students in these schools and colleges. 

 And so it is that many engineering students, like Prof. 

 Pearson's pupils, after they leave college " adapt them- 

 selves to an environment more or less different from that 

 of the existing profession." If these young engineers had 

 been brought up from early youth to observe and think 

 for themselves, there would be no need to teach them the 

 most elementary principles of " scouting " at the ages of 

 eighteen to twenty, when, in truth, they ought to have al- 

 ready entered the practice of their profession. True it is 

 that for these ignorant youngmen the very simplest scien- 

 tific apparatus may serve ; but there are some students who 

 NO. 1638, VOL. 63] 



have already been trained to scout, who come prepared 

 to be taught under our contemptible " brand-new system 

 of technical instruction," and it is for them that we have 

 our ridiculously unnecessary "physicist with palatial 

 laboratory and elaborate and costly implements" and 

 that there exists " the biologist with his 80/. microscopes 

 and specimens drawn from the four quarters of the globe." 

 Surely Prof. Pearson must see that the education which 

 we all know to be so necessary for the development of 

 the faculties ought to be begun in early youth, that there 

 is at present no genuine education in English public 

 schools, and that without physical science such an educa- 

 tion cannot be given. 



It is not alone the teacher in a technical college who 

 complains of the absence of education in the public 

 schools. Whether they apply themselves to commerce 

 or manufactures, whether they enter one profession or 

 another, whether they try to become diplomatists or 

 statesmen, our boys are found to have had no education. 

 In days when all Europe was at war and we were safe 

 in our island, our grandfathers gathered to themselves 

 all the good things of the world, and now we are living 

 on their legacy. And we are blind to the fact that the 

 lean and hungry nations, covetous, cautious and dis- 

 ciplined, are almost quarrelling already over us, their 

 prey. If there are enough honest and thinking men in 

 England this day they will speak to England loud 

 enough to stir her out of her apathy ; or if not, and if 

 England cannot be so stirred, let her descend to her 

 natural position ; let the stranger come in and divide her 

 property ; even the property of those men who are 

 selfishly silent. Our cry is for education and only that ; 

 true education for everybody, from the highest to the 

 lowest, is a national necessity more important than any 

 weapon of war or any political machinery for the re- 

 pression of bad stock, because education will give us all 

 these things and much more, John Perry. 



THE DISCOVERER OF LAKE NOAM I. 

 William Cotton Oswell, Hunter and Explorer. By his 

 son, W. E. Oswell. Two volumes. (London : W. 

 Heinemann, 1900.) 



SO far as the general public aie concerned, the interest 

 in the career of the late Mr. Oswell may be said 

 to begin and end with the period (from 1844 to 1852) 

 during which he made his five expeditions to Africa, at a 

 time when by far the greater portion of that continent 

 was still a terra incognita. But this period of the life of 

 the great explorer and hunter occupies only a compara- 

 tively small portion of the two volumes before us, the 

 bulk of which is taken up by an account of the parentage 

 and early years of Oswell, and with letters to his family 

 and friends. However interesting these may be to his 

 immediate relations, we venture to submit that they appeal 

 but slightly to the general public ; and, in our opinion^ 

 the author would have been much better advised had he 

 condensed his narrative into the space of a single volume 

 of the bulk of one of the two under notice. 



Apart from this, the author has discharged a task of 

 considerable difficulty and delicacy (for it is never an 

 easy matter for a son to write the biography of his father) 

 in a highly creditable and satisfactory manner. 



