484 EDUCATION 



but we must also train our pupils to think about them in the right 

 way. 



796. To sum up: skill in thinking, like other dexterities, 

 depends partly on innate capacity to learn, partly on the amount of 

 practice, and partly on the kind of practice. Innate capacity, though 

 it varies with individuals, is a fixed quantity in each individual. But 

 the amount and kind of practice is within our control. We deliber- 

 ately train young children to think skilfully, and the younger they 

 are the more direct is our teaching, the more closely adapted to the 

 end in view and the needs of the subsequent career. But as they 

 grow older and ripe for the attainment of higher grades of skill, we 

 tend to slacken our efforts, or to seek our ends in a very indirect and 

 ineffectual way. The human being tends to remember only impres- 

 sive things, or those which are hammered into his mind by repeated 

 experiences, and he tends to think only of that which interests him, 

 Often, by way of mental gymnastics, in the vague hope that the 

 youth will remember and think, we supply him with facts which, 

 rightly used, might furnish excellent materials for thought, but 

 which we do not impel him to use, and which he does not use of 

 his own initiative, because by themselves they are uninteresting and 

 of such a kind that his subsequent experiences do not keep them 

 in mind. We put him on the tread-mill and expect him to become 

 speedy in the race. 1 



1 1 remember a professor of zoology telling me some years ago, that though 

 he did his best to convince his pupils, principally medical students, that acquire- 

 ments were not transmissible, his teachings were ' spoilt ' by the physicians and 

 surgeons through whose hands the young men subsequently passed. He quite 

 recognized the importance of the matter, and alluded sorrowfully to the medical 

 evidence given before various Royal Commissions by former members of his 

 class. His lectures consisted in more or less detailed anatomical descriptions of 

 certain types starfish, sea-urchin, earthworm, leech, cockchafer, lobster, dogfish, 

 cod, snake, rabbit, and so forth animals which, by way of practical work, the 

 pupils were required to dissect. His examinations were designed to discover the 

 extent to which these teachings had been committed to memory. Once or twice 

 during a session he mentioned the theory of evolution and expressed his agreement 

 with it. Once or twice, also, he told his pupils that, though the matter was still 

 subjudice, he was convinced that acquirements were not transmissible, and added 

 an account of various experiments, such as the amputation of rats' tails. The 

 anatomical studies of his pupils were so conducted that nothing was learned but 

 facts, their co-existences and resemblances that one species was related to another 

 because such and such structures were possessed by both, that the lobster had 

 certain organs and the rabbit certain others, that the dogfish had no bones but 

 only cartilages in such and such numbers and shapes, but that the cod had bones 

 of which there were just so many in his head, and that the precise shape and 

 spatial relations of these bones were this and that facts that had no bearing, 

 or none at least that he made clear, on the problems of heredity which he 

 recognized as so important ; and, indeed, so little bearing on anything else in 



