250 
NATURE 
[ Fan. 11, 1883 
cases out of twenty that an orderly drawing or diagram is gene- 
rally associated with an orderly mind. In fact, a diagram may 
be regarded as an index of the amount and accuracy of the 
knowledge possessed by the student. The text of the student 
who faiJs in the diagram is generally a more awkward jumble 
than the diagram itself. Hence the facts show that this training 
of the hand is accompanied by much good mental results. ‘This 
is now so generally recognised, that in a not distant period, no 
professor of biology, for instance, will attempt to demonstrate 
practically microscopic structure to students who have had no 
preliminary training in drawing. This is one example out of 
many which might be given, for as natural science is the study 
of nature, and as we can only study her by phenomena, the eye, 
and the hand, and the mind, must work together to achieve 
success, and he who attempts to describe the geology of a dis- 
trict, the minute structure of a frog’s foot, an eclipse of the sun, 
or the rings of Saturn, in words, and words only, has only done 
half his work ; to complete it he must appeal to art for aid. 
Now, many of you may be prepared to concede, without any 
further insistance on my part, that an elementary acquaintance 
with art is of great, nay, of even essential importance, not only 
for its own sake, but because of its aid in natural studies. We 
must then add art to science and literature in order to form a 
complete curriculum. Here pardon me one moment’s digression 
from the direct line of my argument. Many will agree that 
science is aided by art who deny that art is aided by science to 
the same extent. Indeed, some are prepared to urge that one 
who proposes to devote himself to art can derive no possible 
benefit from the study of science. Let us inquire into this a 
little. If we wish to excel in the art of figure-painting, we must 
know anatomy, a most important branch of science ; and as a 
matter of fact, many artists study anatomy as minutely as many 
surgeons do; and in the old days, when the artist and the poet 
were more saturated with the knowledge of the time than they 
are now, we find the great Leonardo at once professor of 
anatomy and founder of a school of painting as yet unsurpassed. 
If we pass from the figure to ornamental design, or if we wish 
to show objects in perspective, is not every line, whether straight 
or curved, dominated by an appeal to geometry? Again, sup- 
pose we take landscape. Here we meet with phenomena of 
colour as much regulated by law as are the phenomena of form, 
and an anatomy of colour is fast being formulated, which to the 
artist of the future will be as precious as the anatomy 
of form has been in the past, and will ever continue to 
be. Let us take, for instance, an artist who wishes to 
paint a sunset, one of the most magnificent sights which it is 
given to man to witness. The sky is covered with clouds here 
and there, and not only do the colours of the clouds vary, 
almost from moment to moment, but in all cases they present 
the strongest contrast to the colour of the sky itself. The artist 
is bewildered, and finds each effect that he would seize to be so 
transient that at last he gives up in despair the attempt to note 
down the various tints. But the possession of a knowledge of 
the part played by the lower strata of our atmosphere in absorb- 
ing now one and now another of the components of the light of 
the setting sun, would change this despair into a joy almost 
beyond expression. For the bewildering changes of colour are 
then discovered to be bound together by a law as beautiful as 
the effects themselves. There is another pint of view. One is 
frequently pained in seeing in an otherwise noble work of art, 
evidences that the artist was crassly ignorant of the phenomena 
he attempted to represent, and in his attempts to transcend 
nature had only succeeded in caricaturing her, painting, for 
example, a rainbow in perspective, or a moon with its dark side 
turned towards the setting sun. Yet these are almost trifles, 
and, in fact, here we have the excuse of the ignorant artist— 
now, I am thankful to say, the representative of a class that is 
fast disappearing—for his defence is, that he has nothing to do 
with such small matters, and that accuracy of this kind may 
quite properly be sacrificed to secure the balance of his picture. 
Now, to return to the main drift of my address, we have seen 
that in any complete system of education neither science nor act 
must be neglected by the side of the old humanities—the old 
more purely literary studies; and it is indeed fortunate for us 
that we live in an age in which the laws and the phenomena of 
the external world have been studied and formulated with such 
diligence and success that it is as easy now to teach science, in 
the best possible way, as it is to teach classics in the best possible 
way. It is half a century since the Germans found out the im- 
portance of the new studies from a national point of view. We 
are now finding it out for ourselves, and finding it out not a 
moment too soon, and it is not needful for me to tell you that 
the transformation which is going on is aeknowledged to be one 
of the highest national importance. It is no longer an abstract 
question of a method of education ; it is a question of the life or 
death of many of our national industries, for, in a struggle for 
existence, how can a man who wins his bread by the application 
of national laws to some branch of industry, if he be ignorant of 
those laws, compete with the man who is acquainted with them ? 
If for man we read nation, you see our present position. How 
far then have we got with our transformation, limiting our 
inquiry to primary and secondary instruction? First, as to ele- 
mentary education. The idea of the education—the compulsory 
education, if necessary, of all the citizens in a state—dates from 
the time of Luther. It is a horrible thing that we should have 
had to wait three and a half centuries since his time for such a 
measure, which is an act of simple justice to each child that is 
brought into the world. In 1524 Luther addressed a letter to 
the Councils of all the towns in Germany begging them to vote 
money, not merely for roads, dykes, guns, and the like, but for 
schoolmasters, so that the poor children might be taught, on the 
ground that if it be the duty of a State to compel its able-bodied 
citizens to take up arms to defend the fatherland, it is a fortiori 
its duty to compel them to send their children to school, and to 
provide schools for those who, without such aid, would remain 
uninstructed. Thanks to our present system, now about ten 
years old, out of an estimated population of 8,000,000 children 
between the ages of two and fifteen, we had last year nearly four 
millions at school, and out of an estimated population of 
4,700,000 between five and thirteen, we had 3,300,000 at school, 
Among this school population elementary science is at last to be 
made a class subject, and we find mechanics, mathematics, 
animal physiology, and botany among the specific subjects in 
addition to the three R’s. 120,000 children received education 
in these specific subjects last year, and if we are justified in 
assuming that as many will learn science when it becomes a class 
subject as now already learn drawing, we may expect ina year 
or two to have this 120,000 swelled into three-quarters of a 
million. I must again insist upon the fact that practical teaching 
in science is the only thing that can be tolerated. Of course, 
with a new subject the great difficulty is the difficulty of the 
teacher. Any system, therefore, of economising teaching power 
is of the highest importance. I am glad to know that a system 
suggested by Col. Donnelly, which uses the utmost economy of 
teaching power, has been carried into admirable practical effect 
at Birmingham, and I believe also at Liverpool, and other large 
towns. So that in the most important centres we may be certain 
that science will be taught in the best manner. It is worth whie 
to dwell on this system for a moment. Under it practical 
teaching is given to boys and girls of the fifth and higher 
standards, and also to the pupil teachers. The subject chosen 
for the boys is mechanics, that for the girls domestic economy, 
giving each of these subjects a wide range of meaning. There 
is a central laboratory in which the experiments are prepared, 
and from which the apparatus ready for use is conveyed 
in a light hand-cart to the various schools—twenty-six in 
number in Birmingham—bzlonging to the Board. In this 
way it is possible to give twenty lessons a week, and the 
circuit of the schoolscan be made ina fortnight. In the intervals 
between the visits of the demonstrator the class teachers re- 
capitulate his lessons and give the children written examinations, 
About 1200 children are now being instructed in this way. To 
make the instruction as real as possible, children are brought out 
to aid in performing the experiments, objects are passed round, 
and questioning at the end of the lecture is encouraged. In the 
education, then, of our children, from the ages of five to thirteen, 
we may rea-onably expect to find that science teaching will in 
the future be carefully looked after. We now come to the secon- 
dary education. Here, again, great progress has been made 
during the last few years. The real difficulties against its intro- 
duction have been the overcrowded state of the old curriculum, 
the scarcity of teachers, the want of sympathy with it, and the 
ignorance of its importance on the part of some headmasters. 
but to those headmasters who held the view that no real training 
could he got out of a subject which boys studied without positive 
pleasure, parents began to reply that whether the boy liked it or 
not he must get that knowledge somewhere. But where the 
experiment was really tried under good conditions it was soon 
found not only that the boys were willing to give three or four 
hours a week of their playtime to scientific subjects, but that the 
