Det. 23, 1869 | 
NATURE 
209. 
state of a town, and in that way sewered towns may still 
be exposed to the evils arising from “ excrement-sodden 
soil” which the Medical Officer of the Privy Council 
has pronounced to be one of the main causes of cholera 
and fever. 
Another point in which there is reason to believe exist- 
ing sanitary arrangements are defective is the facility of 
communication between s2wers and the dwellings from 
which they are intended to convey refuse. Some connec- 
tion of the kind is indispensable for the use of water as a 
transporting vehicle for the refuse; but little attention 
has yet been paid to the fact that the very arrangement 
which facilitates the water-carriage of refuse also favours 
the regurgitation of foul gases from the sewers into streets 
and dwellings. The water traps and syphons commonly 
attached to the connections between houses and sewers 
are seldom or never sufficient to prevent the passage of 
gases; and in this way the inhabitants of sewered towns 
may be exposed to the unwholesome influence of a con- 
stant pollution of the atmosphere as pernicious in its 
action as the use of water polluted with drainage from 
cesspools, or living over an excrement-sodden soil, has 
long been recognised to be. 
These are some of the chief points which the limits of 
the present article will admit of being noticed as being 
comprised in the inquiry to be carried out by the British 
Association Committee. BENJAMIN H. PAUL 
SCIENCE FOR CHILDREN 
HE schoolmasters of the present day may be divided 
into two categories: those who /each, and those 
who hear lessons; the latter class, unfortunately for the 
next generation, being by far the more numerous. The 
mischief done to the community generally by the short- 
comings of inefficient teachers is too well known to 
every one who has pierced below the surface of the great 
question of middle-class education. The difficulties, how- 
ever, that beset a science teacher in his endeavours to 
force scientific truths into the unwiiling and unprepared 
minds of boys, who have been subjected to the sway 
of these same lesson-hearers, can only be realised by 
those who have gone through the task. The case of a 
senior science class, which has been under my charge for 
some months past, will illustrate my meaning most fully. 
It consists of about a dozen boys, whose ages range 
between fourteen and seventeen years, and they receive 
twice a week an hour's instruction on chemistry and 
physics. The class may be divided into two distinct por- 
tions by a perfectly sharp line. Four of the boys have 
had the advantage of six or seven years’ training under 
the principal of the school, who is not only a ripe scholar, 
but also an efficient teacher—a very rare collocation in 
these days. The rest have simply learnt lessons all their 
lives. The four boys who have been éaughf are as men- 
tally distinct from the others, as if they were different 
species of the same genus. The first four are bright, 
attentive, wide-awake—I know of no other term to express 
exactly what I mean—logical, and clear-headed ; they can 
fairly follow a chain of scientific reasoning, and reproduce 
it afterwards link by link; they have a certain power of 
induction and deduction, although of course, being new 
to science, this power is necessarily only just awakened ; 
they can connect and correlate facts and ideas, they can 
enumerate a series of phenomena in logical sequence; in 
a word, although their industry and application are far 
from colossal, the task of teaching them the truths of 
natural science is a comparatively easy one. The other 
boys, as I have said before, almost form a distinct mental 
species. They cannot understand the possibility of learn- 
ing anything without the aid of a book, and the idea of 
finding out anything for themselves has never entered 
their heads. Still they are far from stupid boys, being 
all possessed of good average brains ; yet their faculties 
have not merely been allowed to remain undeveloped, 
but they have been utterly entangled, stunted, and stulti- 
fied by what Dr. Frankland would call their “ previous 
school contamination.” These boys, it must be under- 
stood, are the sons of parents belonging to the upper 
stratum of the middle class, and have mostly been to 
schools conducted by university men with honourable 
initials appended to their names—men, in fact, who are 
scholars but emphatically no teachers. Their great fault is 
a total want of mental method, without which the greatest 
brain is as nought. They are at home in Virgil and 
Horace, some of them are fair Greek scholars ; they have 
“been through” Euclid, and can work moderately difficult 
algebraical problems in a certain mechanical fashion ; 
they are well acquainted with the leading facts of English 
history, and know the exact position and population of 
Adrianople ; but as far as real mental power goes, any 
poor boy, who has been in a National school for three 
years, would beat them hollow. 
These facts surely point out the absolute necessity 
of beginning scientific training at a very early age; and I 
fancy this necessity has not been sufficiently dwelt upon 
in the numberless essays, letters, lectures, and evidence on 
the subject of scientific education with which we have 
been deluged during the past decade. There seems to 
have been a notion abroad, that scientific teaching should 
not be begun before the age of 12 or 14; but why, I 
would ask, should boys’ minds be allowed to remain 
fallow during all these years? The minds of boys of 
7 and 8 should surely be as carefully developed as those 
of their seniors, and there is certainly no means of pure 
mental culture so successful as scientific teaching. A boy 
of this age should not be taught science so much for the 
sake of acquiring a certain number of facts, as of de- 
veloping his powers of observation and reasoning, and 
giving a proper tone to his mental faculties. A boy of 
8 org takes a morning canter of three or four miles on 
his pony, not for the purpose of getting over some 7,090 
yards of ground, but to strengthen his muscles and 
improve his carriage: his science lesson should be an in- 
tellectual canter, taken with the view to strengthening and 
improving his mental muscles and carriage. 
In National and British Schools, and in some few 
middle-class schools conducted on rational principles, this 
great want is supplied by what are known as “ Object 
Lessons.” A natural object, such as a piece of lead or 
sugar, is placed before the class, and its physical pro- 
perties are described by the pupils with the aid of questions 
from the teacher. Its origin and manufacture are also 
given in the case of the older children, and the whole is 
noted down on the black-board in as condensed a manner 
as possible ; the lesson being reproduced in a miniature 
form either v/vd voce or in writing. These lessons are 
