58 DISCOVERY Cfi. 



while somebody explains ; it is the reward of effort. Effort, 

 again, is inspired by interest and sense of duty. Interest alone 

 may tire too quickly ; sense of duty alone may grow formal and 

 unintelligent. Mastery comes by attending long to a particular 

 thing by inquiring, by looking hard at things, by handling and 

 doing, by contriving and trying, by forming good habits of work, 

 and especially the habit of distinguishing between the things 

 that signify and those that do not. Prof. L. C. Miall. 



Success or failure at school or college supply no 

 standards by which the promise of the future may be 

 estimated. Originality of thought or achievement is not 

 measurable by the same units as those of absorbing 

 power of a prescribed pabulum, usually tested by a 

 written examination. To be able to reproduce the words 

 of others, or to shuffle mathematical symbols rapidly, 

 may be creditable, but it is not to be compared with the 

 power of originating ideas or devising new solutions to 

 problems. A student may possess many examination 

 certificates and yet be only a kind of text-book gramo- 

 phone. Unless he acquires also the desire to see and do 

 things independently he knows nothing of the scientific 

 spirit which asks for new knowledge gained by individual 

 inquiry. 



The senior wrangler at Cambridge has often been an 

 inferior man, from the point of view of productive 

 mathematical science, than candidates lower on the list, 

 because the examination tested merely the power of 

 writing out the solutions of known classes of problems 

 quickly and precisely. When Lord Kelvin was a student 

 at Cambridge he produced several original papers in the 

 higher branches of mathematics, yet he was beaten in 

 the final examination and was placed second wrangler. 

 The examiners themselves knew his great mathematical 

 abilities, but the examination was a test of memory 

 rather than of originality. Speaking of Kelvin (then 



