424 
NATURE 
| 
[Sepz. 22, 1870 
in this matter can nevertheless combine for themselves the ad- 
vantages of the horizontal position of the instrument with those 
of the horizontal position of the objects observed by modifying 
the eye-piece in the way figured by Quekett (p. 381, fig. 266.) It 
would be a long task to enumerate fully all the scientific lessons 
which may be gathered, firstly, and all the educational agencies, 
secondly, which may be set and kept in movement by a person 
who possesses himself of this simple apparatus. The mutual 
interdependence of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, their 
solidarité as the French have called it, and as the Germans have 
called it too, copying herein the French, is one of the first lessons 
the observer has forced upon him ; the influence of physical and 
chemical agencies upon the growth and development of living 
beings he soon finds strikingly illustrated ; the mysterious process 
of development itself is readily observable in the eggs of the 
common water-snails and in those of freshwater fish, so that the 
way in which the various organs and systems of organs are 
chiselled out, built up, and finally packed together and stratified 
can be taken note of in these yet transparent representatives of 
these great sub-kingdoms which all the while are undisturbed 
and at peace ; and all these points of large interest are but a few 
of many which these small means will enable anyone to master 
for himself in the concrete actuality, and thoroughly, The necessity 
for carefulness and truthfulness in recording what is seen, the 
necessity for keeping in such records what one observes quite 
distinct from what one infers, the necessity for patience and 
punctuality, are lessons which, from having a moral factor as well 
as ascientific one in their composition, I may specify as belonging 
to the educational lessons which may be gathered from such a 
course of study. 
I have been speaking of the microscope as an instrument of 
education, and I wish before leaving the subject to utter one 
caution as to its use when this particular object of education is in 
view. If a subject is to act educationally, it must be understood 
thoroughly ; and if a subject is to be understood thoroughly, it 
must form one segment or stretch in a continuous chain of known 
facts. Apxréov and tay yvwpluwy, said one of the greatest of 
educators ; you must start from some previously existing basis of 
knowledge, and keep your communications with it uninterrupted 
if your knowledge is not to be unreal. And my concrete appli- 
cation of these generalities is contained in the advice that no 
sudden jump be made from observations carried on with the 
naked eye to observations carried on with the highest powers of 
the microscope. 
beginners, and beginners we all were once, and if our places are 
to be filled, and filled they will be, by better men as we hope 
than ourselves, they will have to be filled, we also hope, by men 
who have yet to become beginners. It is in their interest I 
have been speaking, and I say that a beginner does not ordinarily 
get an intelligent conception of the revelations of the microscope 
except in Bacon’s words, Ascendendo continenter et gradatium, by 
progressing gradually from observations with the naked eye 
through observations dependent upon dissecting lenses, doublets 
and triplets, and the lower powers of the compound microscope, 
up to observations to be made with the higher and highest 
magnifying powers. 
Unless he ascend by gradations from organs and systems, 
structures and tissues and cells, his wonder and admiration at the 
results of the ultimate microscope analysis, of what he had but 
a moment before knowledge of only in the concrete and by the 
naked eye is likely to be but unintelligent. 
There are three other agencies which can be set into activity 
with nearly as little trouble and difficulty as the simple apparatus 
of which I have just been speaking, and which will, like it, secure 
as a necessary preliminary discipline ‘‘Aropddeutik” for their 
rational comprehension of Biology. These are Local Museums, 
Local Field Clubs, and Local Natural Histories. Local 
authorities, persons of local influence, should engage and interest 
themselves in the starting into life of the two former of these 
agencies, and if some such person as Gilbert White could be 
found in each county to write the Natural History of its Sel- 
borne, I know not at what cost it could not be well to retain 
his services. As the world is governed upon each particular 
area of its surface, there is to be found a certain percentage of 
the population occupying it who have special calls for particular 
lines of study. It is the interest of each county to have such 
means and such institutions in being as will render it possible to 
detect the existence of persons gifted with such special vocations, 
to give the talent thus entrusted to them fair scope for develop- 
ment, and to render smaller the risk of their dying mute and in- 
I am speaking of the course to be pursued by ° 
glorious. A young man who is possessed of a talent for Natural 
Science and Physical Inquiry generally, may have the know- 
ledge of this predisposition made known to himself and to others, 
for the first time, by his introduction to a well-arranged Loca 
Museum. In such an institution, either all at once, or gradually, 
the conviction may spring up within him that this investigation 
of physical emblems is the line of investigations to which he 
should be content to devote himself, relinquishing the pursuit of 
other things ; and then, if the museum in question is really a 
well-arranged one, a recruit may be thereby won for the first and 
growing army of physical investigators, and one more man 
saved from the misery of finding, when he has been taken into 
some other career, that he has somehow or other mistaken his 
profession, and made of his career one life-long mistake. Here 
comes the question. What is a well-arranged museum? The 
answer is, a well-arranged museum for the particular purpose of 
which we are speaking, is one in which the natural objects which 
belong to the locality, and which have already struck upon the 
eye of such a person as the one contemplated, are clearly ex- 
plained in a well-arranged catalogue. The curiosity which is 
the mother of science is not awakened for the first time in the 
museum, but out of doors, in the wood, by the side of the 
brook, on the hillside, by scarped cliff and quarried stone ; it 
is the function of the museum, by rendering possible the intellec- 
tual pleasure, which grows out of the surprise with which a 
novice first notes the working of his faculty of inspiration, to 
prevent this curiosity from degenerating into the mere wood- 
man’s craft of the gamekeeper, or the rough empiricism of the 
farmer. The first step to be taken in a course of natural instruction, 
is the providing of means whereby the faculties of observation 
and of verification may be called into activity ; and the first 
exercise the student should be set down to is that of recognising 
in the actual thing itself, the various properties and peculiarities 
which some good book or some good catalogue tells him are 
observable in it. This is the first step, and, as in some other 
matters, ce #’est gue le premier pas cui coute, And it need not 
cost much. There is a name familiar to Section D, and indeed 
not likely for a long while to be forgotten by members of the 
British Association generally, extrinsic means as well as the in- 
trinsic merits of the well-loved man conspiring to keep his memory 
fresh among us, and the beaver of that name, Edward Forbes, 
has left it as his opinion that ‘‘It is to the development of the 
provincial museums that, I believe, we must look in future for 
the extension of intellectual pursuits throughout the land.” (Lec- 
ture ‘On the Educational Uses of Museums,” delivered at the 
Museum of Practical Geology and published in 1853. Cited by 
Toynbee, ‘‘ Hints on the Formation of Local Museums,” 1863, 
p. 46.) With the words of Edward Forbes I might do well to end 
what I have to say, but I should like to say a word as to the policy 
of confining the contents of a local museum to the natural- 
history specimens of the particular locality. No doubt the first 
thing to be done is the collection of the local specimens, and 
this alike in the interest of the potential Cuviers and Hugh 
Millers, who may be born in the district, and in the interest of 
the man of science who may yisit the place when on his travels. 
But so long as a specimen from the antipodes or from whatever 
corner of our world be really valuable, and be duly catalogued 
before it is admitted into the museum, so that the lesson it has 
to teach may be learnable, I do not see my way towards ad- 
vising that foreign specimens be excluded. It is to my mind 
more important that all specimens should be catalogued as soon 
as received, than that any should be rejected when offered. 
I must not occupy your time further witi this portion of my 
address. Let me first say that a person who wishes to know what 
a Field Club can do for its members, and not for them only, but 
for the world at large, will do well to purchase one, or any 
number more than one, of the Transactions of the Tyneside 
Naturalist’s Field Club; and that if there be any person who 
thinks that White’s Selborne relates to a time and place so far 
off that there can be no truth in the book, and who yet would 
like to try upon himself the working of the fourth disciplinary 
agencies of which I have spoken; that, namely, of sending 
some Local Natural History on the spot of which it treats, and 
comparing it with the things themselves zz sit, let him repair to 
Weymouth, and work and walk up and down its cliffs and valleys 
with Mr. Darwin's book in his hands. 
I shall not be suspected in this place and upon this occasion, 
nor, as I hope, upon any other, of a wish to depreciate the value 
of scientific instruction as an engine for training the mind. But 
neither, on the other hand, should I wish to depreciate the value 
