172 SCIENCE AND ART AND EDUCATION vn 



of it, it is needful you should familiarise yourself 

 with so much as you are called upon to teach 

 soak yourself in it, so to speak until you know it 

 as part of your daily life and daily knowledge, and 

 then you will be able to teach anybody. That is 

 what I mean by practical teachers, and, although 

 the deficiency of such teachers is being remedied 

 to a large extent, I think it is one which has long 

 existed, and which has existed from no fault of 

 those who undertook to teach, but because, until 

 the last score of years, it absolutely was not possi- 

 ble for any one in a great many branches of science, 

 whatever his desire might be, to get instruction 

 which would enable him to be a good teacher of ele- 

 mentary things. All that is being rapidly altered, 

 and I hope it will soon become a thing of the past. 

 The last point I have referred to is the question 

 of the sufficiency of time. And here comes the 

 rub. The teaching of science needs time, as any 

 other subject ; but it needs more time proportion- 

 ally than other subjects, for the amount of work 

 obviously done, if the teaching is to be, as I have 

 said, practical. Work done in a laboratory involves 

 a good deal of expenditure of time without always 

 an obvious result, because we do not see anything 

 of that quiet process of soaking the facts into the 

 mind, which takes place through the organs of the 

 senses. On this ground there must be ample time 

 given to science teaching. What that amount 

 of time should be is a point which I need not 



