SCIENCE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 253 



unnecessary. The additional clerical work involved in the keep- 

 ing of the two sets of names of borrowers and guarantors of bor- 

 rowers, together with the labor necessitated by looking them up 

 in directories and elsewhere, will cost more, save in very excep- 

 tional cases, than will the books which may be lost through the 

 adoption of extreme liberality in the issuing of borrowers' cards. 

 The people's money in this part of its library's administration, as 

 in every other, should be spent rather in extending and making 

 more easily accessible to the average citizen the library's re- 

 sources than in setting barriers of red tape between the books 

 and the people who own them and wish to use them. 



SCIENCE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. 



BY M. P. E. M. BERTHELOT. 



part performed by science in the general education of the 

 human mind and the progress of civilization has been often 

 misconceived by pedagogues, hedged in as they are by the tradi- 

 tional formulas of classical teaching. I recollect having heard a 

 conversation some twenty-five years ago between Duruy, then 

 Minister of Public Instruction, and a general school inspector, in 

 which Duruy spoke of the importance of the experimental sci- 

 ences and the necessity of giving them a larger place in the 

 school course. The inspector, proof against general ideas, and 

 despising utilitarian results, the importance of which he could 

 not comprehend, saw nothing in this but a kitchen school, good at 

 most to teach future dealers in petroleum and coal. It would not 

 be hard to find similar opinions among some of the blind parti- 

 sans of classical instruction founded on the study of Greek and 

 Latin. 



Yet, if the material conditions of human life have been 

 changed if the accumulation of capital and the increase of the 

 productive force of man's labor have gradually added to the gen- 

 eral ease and given workmen a relative independence and rights 

 which they did not formerly possess, and which are extending 

 every day for the good of the race such advance, we should 

 never cease to recollect, is not due to literary studies or scholastic 

 or religious or philosophical discussions, but is attributable essen- 

 tially to the growth of science and to the increase of general 

 wealth brought about by it. 



This immense development of wealth and industry, as well as 

 the correlative development of the liberal and democratic spirit, 

 are due, we declare loudly, to the discoveries of modern science. 

 If the supply of food at the disposal of the human species goes on 



