IV.] ON ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION IN PHYSIOLOGY. 91 



desire to make an orator, an author, and a mathe- 

 matician of everybody. A stumbling reader, a pot- 

 hook writer, and an arithmetician who has not got 

 beyond the rule of three, is not a person of brilliant 

 acquirements ; but the difference between such a 

 member of society and one who can neither read, 

 write, nor cipher is almost inexpressible ; and no one 

 now-a-days doubts the value of instruction, even if it 

 goes no farther. 



The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous 

 thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If 

 knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that 

 it is other than a very valuable possession, however 

 infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little 

 knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so 

 much as to be out of danger ? 



If William Harvey's life-long labours had revealed 

 to him a tenth part of that which may be made 

 sound and real knowledge to our boys and girls, he 

 would not only have^ been what he was, the greatest 

 physiologist of his age, but he would have loomed 

 upon the seventeenth century as a sort of intellectual 

 portent. Our " little knowledge" would have been 

 to him a great, astounding, unlooked-for vision of 

 scientific truth. 



I really see no harm which can come of giving our 

 children a little knowledge of physiology. But then, 

 as I have said, the instruction must be real, based 

 upon observation, eked out by good explanatory 

 diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher 

 whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study 



