376 BRAIN WORK AND 



is attended with the best success. The boys 

 work with the physical instruments, and they 

 study geography in the field, instruments in 

 hands, as well as in the class-room. Some of 

 their surveys filled my heart, as an old geog- 

 rapher, with joy.* 



The Moscow Technical School surely was not 

 an ideal school. f It totally neglected the humani- 

 tarian education of the young men. But we 

 must recognise that the Moscow experiment 

 not to speak of hundreds of other partial experi- 

 ments has perfectly well proved the possibility 

 of combining a scientific education of a very 

 high standard with the education which is 

 necessary for becoming an excellent skilled 

 workman. It has proved, moreover, that the 

 best means for producing really good skilled 

 labourers is to seize the bull by the horns, and to 

 grasp the educational problem in its great fea- 

 tures, instead of trying to give some special skill 

 in some handicraft, together with a few scraps of 

 knowledge in a certain branch of some science. 



* It ia evident that the Gordon's College industrial department 

 is not a mere copy of any foreign school ; on the contrary, I 

 cannot help thinking that if Aberdeen has made that excellent 

 move towards combining science with handicraft, the move 

 was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on 

 a smaller scale, in the Aberdeen daily schools. 



f What this school is now, I don't know. In the first years of 

 Alexander III.'s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good 

 institutions of the early part of the reign of Alexander II. 

 But the system was not lost. It was carried over to America. 



