Sir Joshua Fitch's Address 265 



ning to prevail among many of our best teachers. 

 What the Germans call Naturkiinde, and what Pro- 

 fessor Huxley called physiography, are receiving daily 

 increased attention. From great historical schools 

 like Eton and St. Paul's down to the humblest infant 

 department and even to the pauper school, there are 

 evidences of the zest with which scholars interest 

 themselves in botany, in natural history, in bee cul- 

 ture, in the collecting of butterflies, ferns, or grasses, 

 and in keeping a record, partly literary and descrip- 

 tive and partly pictorial, of what has been seen and 

 observed. Some of our most enterprising publishers, 

 both English and American, have contributed excel- 

 lent school-books, well illustrated and attractive, and 

 yet careful and scientific in their statements of facts, 

 by which teachers may be enabled to arouse a new 

 appetite for a kind of knowledge hitherto absent from 

 the ordinary school curriculum, and also to satisfy that 

 appetite by means of systematic lessons. 



It is a remarkable fact that one science, that of 

 astronomy, occupies a less prominent position in 

 modern school plans than it filled some years ago. 

 When I was young I remember that visiting teachers 

 were on the staff of upper schools for girls, and that 

 these tutors gave lectures on the elementary truths 

 of astronomy, and used to advertise their qualifica- 

 tions to teach what they described as the " use of 

 the globes ". The teaching was, to say the truth, not 

 very scientific. The manifest absurdity of using a 

 pair of solid globes both of the same size — the one to 

 represent the earth, and the other the whole firmament 

 of heaven — vitiated the teaching from the first, and 

 caused the lessons to resolve themselves into twisting 



