1 8 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



When the National Educational Association says that high 

 schools should be encouraged to omit the study of algebra and 

 geometry and that the colleges should be compelled to accept for 

 admission an equivalent amount of " science " — God save the 

 mark — it is time for the true friends of science to call a halt. 



I may say in parentheses that only the other day the school 

 superintendent in one of our more newly developed parts of the 

 country said he had to make a change because it was so easy to 

 find thoroughly competent teachers of physics, but that so few 

 of them ever knew any algebra. (Laughter.) For the impor- 

 tance of scientific training to the student in our high schools and 

 colleges is not due primarily, or in large measure, to the facts 

 of physics or biology that he learns in the school. It is due to the 

 training in certain habits of observation and deduction in certain 

 methods of hypothesis and verification, which he can get more 

 effectively by a good course in science than by one predominantly 

 devoted to languages, where the scientific training is merely 

 incidental. That the facts of physics or biology are more in- 

 teresting to the student of the world than those of Latin and 

 Greek and have more obvious bearing on everyday life is a help 

 to the teacher in securing the voluntary co-operation of the 

 pupil; but it is far from being the fundamental reason why the 

 subjects themselves are educationally valuable. It is not the 

 subject that makes the course scientific; it is the method. 



You have been good enough, Mr. President, to refer to my 

 father's connection with the Academy, and I for my part am 

 glad to take the opportunity to say that he regarded his election 

 to membership in this body as the greatest honor he ever received. 

 I feel sure, therefore, that I shall be pardoned if I illustrate the 

 point I have just made by reference to my father's teaching. 



Fifty years ago the one course in the Academic Department of 

 Yale College, where modern science was really taught, was the 

 course in Freshman Greek. For my father, though he had the 

 highest enjoyment of classical literature, was, by training and 

 temperament, a philologist; and he taught the Freshmen who 

 came under him to take Greek verbs to pieces and compare and 



