646 
intellectual and emotional faculties. Fondness for reading will 
come to you if your companions are fond of reading. English 
and English subjects are badly taught in schools ; hardly any- 
body anywhere seems able to teach them; one’s own reading 
and discussion with friends are far better for one’s education than 
any course of lectures. However limited your past education 
may have been, whatever defects some hypercritical learned man 
may see in the school system under which you have been brought 
up, Starting from your present conditions, if you are fond of 
reading and have common sense, there is nothing to prevent 
your becoming men of the finest kind of liberal education. But 
you must exert your common sense and try to distinguish 
clearly what is essential from what is unessential in education. 
English literature is equal to, if not greater than, any literature 
of any people that exists now or has ever been. The language 
of our great Empire is enough for any man who is not specially 
fond of language study. If you love to study foreign or dead 
languages, do so; butif you are not so inclined you will be 
acting foolishly to waste your time over them. 
The average man cannot be much hurt intellectually by any- 
thing he does, but the higher intellect is, I think, easily hurt, 
and I know of several men who had genius, real genius, whose 
intellects have been permanently dwarfed by a six months’ 
course of classics pursued with the base object—degrading to 
classics and to themselves—of becoming able to pass an 
examination. There are some kinds of moral degradation 
which are final ; the holy of holies has been desecrated once 
for all. My language about this matter will not probably be 
understood by more than a few of my hearers, but if there is 
even one who understands, my message is very important. If 
such a one is here I would warn him that there are certain 
prices too large to pay for examination success. I object very 
much to those examination systems in which certain things are 
compulsory. Of course, we cannot get rid of all compulsory 
things. English and English subjects must be compulsory on 
English students. But I do say that the list of compulsory 
things should be made as small as possible. I am told that a 
knowledge of the German language must be made compulsory 
for chemists and biologists. I am sorry to think that this may 
be so, But inasmuch as the men who tell me this say that it is 
the case also for physicists and mathematicians and engineers, 
I venture to doubt the necessity for compulsion in any case 
whatsoever. Iam perfectly certain that in these days of much 
publication of translations and abstracts of foreign scientific 
papers, no kind of physicist or engineer needs French or German 
or any foreign language so much that it is 2#zferatzve on him to 
make a study of it The men who insist on the study of a 
language other than English do not seem to know how difficult 
such a study is for some students. Time will not allow me to 
do it here, but I hope some time to have a chance of pricking this 
compulsory foreign language bubble which everybody is cherish- 
ing at the present time without really thinking about its intrinsic 
value. How often have I heard common men say that they 
abhor translations ; that the style and real flavour of an author 
are only to be had in the original. I notice that such men read 
very little. I doubt if the average educated man ever does get 
that kind of appreciation of a foreign author which the author’s 
educated countrymen get so easily. I have met all sorts of men 
in my life, and I have never seen reason to alter the opinion of 
my young days that a lover of reading can get immense satisfac- 
tion from a translation—whether it is from Greek or Latin, 
French or German, Spanish or Italian, Russian, Scandinavian 
or Hebrew ; whether it is Omar Khayyum or the Rig Veda, the 
Talmud or the Koran, or the Bible. To the lover of English 
all literature is open. The man who insists on reading ‘ the 
original” seems to me like a tethered cow, such as we 
see in Jersey; it crops the grass very closely, but surely 
it must sometimes sigh for a little more freedom and a 
more extensive range of grazing! If you had finished 
your course here I would say to you that we are all 
getting far too learned in natural science. We read far too 
many of the latest papers. Some of the greatest scientific 
workers of our times—men who are constantly advancing the 
boundaries of knowledge—read almost nothing of what other 
men do. I wish I had time to give you some interesting, and 
indeed absurd, examples of this. The average scientific man 
merely casts his eyes over the twenty or thirty scientific 
periodicals that every man buys every month ; he does not even 
read that valuable periodical ‘‘ Science Abstracts,” or those 
NO. 1721, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
LOcTOBER 23, 1902 
abstracts of chemi¢al papers published so voluminously, for he 
has no time. The men who read everything that is written in 
scientific journals, not merely in England and America, but also 
in Germany and France, seem to me to have no time to do 
anything else ; they have no time for scientific work of their 
own. Indeed, they know so much that a simple investigation 
such as they might begin upon their own account seems insignifi- 
cant to them and quite unworthy of the time that they would have 
to spend upon it. I ask only that in matters like this of foreign 
languages and so much reading of scientific papers you should 
really judge for yourselves. In these days you can recognise the 
manufactured men of science by their taking up a notion without 
thinking about it, by their inclination to follow a leader as a 
flock of sheep follows the ‘bell-wether, a phenomenon studied 
by a famous philosopher named Sydney Ortheris. 
When the Prince Consort tried to impress upon this nation 
those ideas of training in science and art which, if they had been 
attended to, would have kept us in the front of industrial pro- 
gress, there was one of his ideas which took root, and which has 
given rise to the work of the Science and Art Department. I 
know the faults of the department as well as anybody, but all 
my life I have been pointing out its enormous services to the 
country. No other country in the world has anything to compare 
with it. When I think of our industrial supremacy before 1870, 
and how during thirty years some of us have been vainly warning 
a careless people that the combination of wisdom and knowledge 
which we call science, neglected in the education of all well-to- 
do people, would lead other nations to the capture of our 
industries; when I think of the utter failure of our higher 
educational authorities to recognise facts, I bless the Science 
and Art Department. For more than forty years, in 
towns remote from universities, it has been possible for the 
poorest apprentice or workman to get instruction in natural 
science. These science and art classes were open to the very 
poorest. Until lately there were no other classes open to rich, 
clever students. It is astonishing to me that men should be 
ignorant of the fact that it is the Science and Art Department 
which has so far saved our industries. I can speak with know- 
ledge of the fengineering industries. Of the many hundreds of 
thousands of pupils who have successfully passed our examina- 
tions, a very large proportion, by the combination of their 
scientific knowledge or scientific habits of thought with practical 
workshop knowledge and through their energy, became foremen 
and managers, and in many cases owners, of works. I need not 
dwell on the fact that every year since 1869 many Whitworth 
scholars have been sent out into the industrial world, and I 
affirm of my own knowledge that these men have become such 
captains of industry as no other country in the world has at its 
command. 
If only our capitalists had even the most elementary 
technical training such as is suitable for capitalists, the men 
educated by the Science and Art Department would alone have 
enabled them to retain that indusirial supremacy the loss of 
which is being bewailed day by day in the newspapers. Many 
of our best men are making bricks without straw. They dis- 
cover, they invent, they project improvements. But if the 
owner of the works, the son or grandson of the creator of an 
industry, if all the directors of a company, with however 
scientific a manager, are quite ignorant of those natural science 
principles on which the industry is based, if they cannot distin- 
guish between good and evil, there is nothing for the industry 
except to go upon lines that get more and more old-fashioned 
until the works stop through inanition. And yet I have heard 
of cases in which old science students, in spite of heart-breaking 
failures to interest their superiors, have by dogged persistence 
maintained works as paying concerns, in spite of competition 
from American and German and Swiss strategists of the best 
polytechnic training. 
Many of the most successful students hide the source to 
which they owe their scientific training, because the science 
class fees are small; the classes are open to the poorest 
students, and in this country caste feeling so predominates 
that no man likes to have it thought that he comes of poor 
parents or that he ever attended a class to which poor students 
were admitted. If all the successful old Science and Art students 
comprehended how much harm is being done just now by their 
careful concealment of the fact that the Science and Art 
Department used to be, and in many places still is, the only 
agency through which a scientific training could be given in this 
