SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION. 631 



through, failure to exercise them then that they suffer atrophy. 

 The so-called science introduced into a few schools in answer to 

 the persistent demands of its advocates has been in most cases a 

 shallow fraud, of no value whatever educationally. Boys see 

 oxygen made and things burned in it, which gives them much 

 pleasure ; but, after all, this is but the old lesson learning in an 

 interesting shape, and has no superior educational effect. I would 

 here repeat what I have recently urged elsewhere, that in the 

 future all subjects must be taught scientifically at school, in order 

 to inculcate those habits of mind which are termed scientific 

 habits ; the teaching of scientific method not the mere shibbo- 

 leths of some branch of natural science must be insisted on. No 

 doubt some branch of chemistry, with a due modicum of physics, 

 etc., is the subject by means of which we may best instill the scien- 

 tific habits associated with experimental studies, but it must be 

 the true chemistry of the discoverer, not the cookery-book-receipt 

 pseudo-form which has so long usurped its place. Whatever be 

 taught, let me repeat that mere repetition work and lesson learn- 

 ing must give place to a system of allowing children to do things 

 themselves. Should we succeed in infusing the research spirit 

 into our teaching generally, then there will be hope that, in the 

 course of a generation or so, we shall cease to be the Philistines 

 we are at the present time ; the education given in our schools 

 will be worthy of being named a " liberal education" which it 

 never will be so long as we worship the old world classical fetich, 

 and allow our schools to be controlled by those who reverence this 

 alone, having never been instructed in a wider faith. 



As regards our college courses, I see no reason to modify the 

 views expressed in my address to the Chemical Section of the Brit- 

 ish Association at Aberdeen in 1885 ; on the contrary, the experi- 

 ence I have since gained as a teacher and examiner has served 

 only to strengthen them and to convince me of the paramount 

 necessity of a very radical change in our system of instruction, 

 and I rejoice at the increasing evidence of a state of unrest both 

 at home and abroad. The "thorough" course of qualitative 

 analysis which it has long been customary to impose at a very 

 early period of the student's career must, I venture to think, be 

 relegated to near its close ; this course certainly has not the effect 

 of producing competent analysts, and but too often reduces those 

 who toil through it to the dead level of machines ; in hundreds of 

 cases I have seen students, as it were, hang up their intelligence 

 on the clothes peg outside and enter the examination room 

 masked with a set of analytical tables, through which alone they 

 allow themselves to be actuated, and to which they render the 

 blindest obedience. Qualitative analysis actually requires the full- 

 est exercise of the mental faculties as well as considerable manip- 



