1869 SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION 443 



to be an amplification of Sir Joseph Fayrer's plan in 

 1866, with respect to all the tribes of India (see p. 

 394, and Appendix I.) 



On April 7 he delivered his " Scientific Education : 

 Notes of an After-Dinner Speech " before the Philo- 

 mathic Society at Liverpool (Coll. Ess. iii. Ill), one 

 part of which deals with the attitude of the clergy 

 towards physical science, and expresses the necessary 

 antagonism between science and Roman Catholic 

 doctrine, which appears more forcibly in one of his 

 speeches at the School Board in 1871 (see ii. p. 40). 



In this and other educational addresses he had 

 suggested that one of the best ways of imparting to 

 children a preliminary knowledge of the phenomena 

 of nature would be a course of what the Germans 

 call "Erdkunde," or general information about the 

 world we live in. It should reach from our simplest 

 everyday observations to wide generalisations of 

 physical science; and should supply a background 

 for the study of history. To this he gave the name 

 "Physiography," a name which he believed to be 

 original, until in 1877 his attention was called to the 

 fact that a Physiographie had been published in Paris 

 thirty years before. 



The idea was no new one with him. Part of his 

 preliminary lectures at the School of Mines had been 

 devoted to something of the kind for the last dozen 

 years; he had served on the Committee of the 

 British Association, appointed in 1866 as the result 

 of a paper by the present Dean Farrar, then a 



