SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE 65 



pleads very strongly for the teaching of \s-hat he 

 calls physical geography (the German " Erdkunde ") 

 — a description of the earth, its place and relation to 

 other bodies, its structure and features, its winds, 

 and tides, and mountains, its plants and animals, 

 and its varieties of men. 



In the other portions of this same volume Huxley 

 returns to tliis question again and again. In fact 

 the key-note of the whole book is to emphasise, 

 as strongly as possible, the value of scientific train- 

 ing and scientific methods in education. Huxley 

 asks why it is that men of different professions and 

 businesses are not taught science as part of their 

 everyday education. Why don't the clergy as a 

 body, he asks, acquire some tincture of physical 

 science such as will enable them to understand the 

 difficulties there are in the minds of thoughtful and 

 intelligent men who have learned these things ? He 

 divides the clergy into three sections : " an immense 

 body who are ignorant and speak out ; a small 

 proportion who know and are silent ; and a minute 

 minority who know and speak according to their 

 knowledge." He insists, too, that scientific train- 

 ing must be largely practical, in the way of object- 

 lessons. Let the child not only be told that the 

 magnet attracts iron, but let him see that it does, 

 and let him feel the pull for himself, and esjxjcially 

 tell him that it is his first duty to doubt until he is 

 compelled by the absolute authority of Nature to 

 believe. He points out very truly that although 

 people talk of the difficulty of teaching young chil- 

 dren natural science, they, at the same time, insist 

 upon their learning the catechism, which contains 

 propositions far more difficult to comprehend than 



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