228 THE STUDY OF ZOOLOGY vn 



know; and real knowledge in science means 

 personal acquaintance with the facts, be they 

 few or many.^ 



^ It has "been suggested to me that these 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 know- 

 ledge, 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 succes- 

 sion of organisms, will lose all its effect in protecting the young 

 against the intellectual epidemics to which they are exposed. 



[The remarks on p. 222 applied to the Natural History Collec- 

 tion of the British Museum in 1861. ■ The visitor to the Natural 

 History Museum in 1894 need go no further than the Great Hall 

 to see the realisation of my hopes by the present Director.] 



