616 HENRY A. ROWLAND 



danger in this process that the mind may become over cautious and thus 

 present a weakness when brought in contact with an unscrupulous per- 

 son who cares little for truth and a great deal for effect. But if we 

 believe in the maxim that truth will prevail and consider it the duty 

 of all educated men to aid its progress, the kind of mind which I describe 

 is the proper one to foster by education. Let the student be brought 

 face to face with nature: let him exercise his reason with respect to the 

 simplest physical phenomenon and then, in the laboratory, put his opin- 

 ions to the test; the result is invariably humility, for he finds that nature 

 has laws which must be discovered by labor and toil and not by wild 

 flights of the imagination and scintillations of so-called genius. 



Those who have studied the present state of education in the schools 

 and colleges tell us that most subjects, including the sciences, are taught 

 as an exercise to the memory. I myself have witnessed the melancholy 

 sight in a fashionable school for young ladies of those who were born 

 to be intellectual beings reciting page after page from memory, without 

 any effort being made to discover whether they understood the subject 

 or not. There are even many schools, so-called, where the subject of 

 physics or natural philosophy itself is taught, without even a class ex- 

 periment to illustrate the subject and connect the words with ideas. 

 Words, mere words, are taught and a state of mind far different from 

 that above described is produced. If one were required to find a sys- 

 tem of education which would the most surely and certainly disgust the 

 student with any subject, I can conceive of none which would do this 

 more quickly than this method, where he is forced to learn what he 

 does not understand. It is said of the Faraday that he never could 

 understand any scientific experiment thoroughly until he had not only 

 seen it performed by others, but had performed it himself. Shall we 

 then expect children and youth to do what Faraday could not do? A 

 thousand times better never teach the subject at all. 



Tastes differ, but we may safely say that every subject of study which 

 is thoroughly understood is a pleasure to the student. The healthy 

 mind as well as the healthy body craves exercise, and the school room 

 or the lecture room should be a source of positive enjoyment to those 

 who enter it. Above all. the study of nature, from the magnificent uni- 

 verse, across which light itself, at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, 

 cannot go in less than hundreds of years, down to the atom of which 

 millions are required to build up the smallest microscopic object, should 

 be the most interesting subject brought to the notice of the student. 



Some are born blind to the beauties of the world around them, some 



