NATURE 



489 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1S72 



CANON KINGS LEY ON PHYSIOLOGICAL 



TRAINING 

 'T~'HE recent address of Canon Kingsley, as President 

 -^ of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, has struck 

 a key-note which has been widely responded to. Not that 

 he has s:iid anything new ; but truths arc none the less 

 true for being world-old. It is something to find a man 

 of Mr. Kingsley's popularity and influence insisting on 

 the need of physical and scientitic culture ; it is more that 

 the utterance should be made to a crowded audience at 

 one of our great centres of industry ; it is still more that 

 our daily and weekly papers should at length discern the 

 iniportance of that which a select few have long been 

 preaching in vain. We can, however, only refer to some 

 of the more important points on which the lecturer 

 touched, referring our readers to the report in extenso, 

 in the Biniuiigham Daily Post. 



The following admirable advice was given to the 

 younger students among the assembly : — 



■' Let me warn you that none of you will profit by any 

 lectures, unless you study at home the text-books recom- 

 mended by the lecturer. You will be otherwise little 

 wiser than a man who should purpose to learn arithmetic 

 by listening to talk about the proportion of numbers with- 

 out doing sums himself. You will not teach yourselves 

 even the attitude necessary for your subject — the attitude 

 of mind, by which the facts were discovered, by which 

 they must be understood, by which they must be turned 

 to use. You will not acquire, by mere lecture-hearing, 

 the inductive habit of mind which arranges and judges of 

 facts. Still less, therefore, will you acquire the deductive 

 habit of mind which makes use of facts practically after 

 they have been arranged and judged ; and the lecturer will 

 be to you but a sort of singer, a player upon a fiddle, who 

 makes for you pleasant and interesting noises for a while, 

 producing mere impressions which never sink into the 

 mtellect, but merely touch the emotions, to run off them 

 at the first distraction, like water off a duck's back. 

 Therefore, remember this for yourselves in this age of 

 periodical literature and literature made easy : we are all 

 too apt to forget that what we did you must do, if you 

 wish to be as good men as we, viz., work for yourselves, 

 as we did ; that good lectures, like good reviews, are not 

 meant to see for you, but to teach you to use your own 

 eyes ; and those you must use at home in hard study, 

 personal study, continuous study — and study, too, rather 

 of one subject than of many subjects, in order that, by 

 learning how to learn one thing thoroughly, you may learn 

 how to learn anything and everything else in its turn." 



After referring to the evils of war in producing the 

 exactly opposite results to those brought about by the 

 process of Natural Selection, by the Destruction of the 

 Fittest, the lecturer thus proceeds : — ' 



'■ Peace, prosperous, civilised, humane, such asv.'e enjoy 

 now, is fraught with the very same dangers. In the first 

 place tens of thousands — who knows it not ? — lead seden- 

 tary lives, stooping, asphyxiated, employing as small a 

 fraction of their bodies as of their minds ; and that such 

 a life must tell upon their offspring — it may be for gene- 

 rations to come — what medical man does not know full 

 well ? And all this in dwellings, workshops, mines, and 

 what not, where the influences, the very atmosphere of 

 which tend to unhealth, and not to health ; to drunken- 

 ness an a solace under the feeling of unhealth and all 



No. 155 — VOL. VI. 



unhealth's depressing influences. But now — and this is 

 one of the most fearful problems with which modern 

 civilisation has to deal — we interfere with natural selection 

 from conscientious care of life just as much as war itself 

 does. War kills the most fit to live. We spend vast 

 energies in saving alive those who, looking at them from 

 a merely physical point of view, are most fit to die. 

 Everything which tends to make it more easy to live — 

 every sanitary reform, prevention of pestilence, medical 

 discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, im- 

 provement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, prisons, every 

 reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunken- 

 ness, every influence, in short, which has (so I am told) 

 increased the average length of life in these islands since 

 the first establishment of life insurance offices, 150 yeirs 

 ago, by nearly one-third — every influence of this kind, I 

 say, saves persons alive who would othcnvise have died ; 

 and the great majority of these persons, even in surgical 

 cases and cases of zymotic disease, will be those of the 

 least resisting power, the weaklier ; thus preserved to 

 produce, in their turn, a weaklier progeny. And what 

 will you do with it ? Do I say that we ought not to save 

 them if we can ? God forbid ! The weakling, the 

 diseased — whether infant or adult — is there on earth a 

 British citizen ! no more responsible for its own weakli- 

 ness than for its own existence. Society — that is, in plain 

 English, you and I and our ancestors — are responsible 

 for both ; and we must fulfil the duty, and keep the weakly 

 person in life, and if we can, heal, strengthen, develop to 

 the utmost, and make the best of that which ' Fate and 

 our own deservings ' have given us to deal with." 



The practical appUcation of this teaching was then 

 pointed out : — 



" And so as to the laws of personal health ; — enough, and 

 more than enough, is known already to be applied safely 

 and easily by any adult, however unlearned, to the pre- 

 servation, not only of his own health, but of that of his 

 children ; the value of healthy habitations, of personal 

 cleanliness, of pure air, pure water, of various kinds of 

 food, as tending to make bone, fat, or muscle, provided 

 only that the food be unadulterated — and you might stop 

 the adulteration in Birmingham in a month or week if you 

 chose. . . . Have you not here, ready made to your 

 hands, an engine for extending sound knowledge of the 

 laws of health? In a great manufacturing district, which 

 specially needs those laws to be known and obeyed, you 

 have this Institution always teaching physical science. 

 It would not, therefore, go beyond its province in teaching 

 the physical science of health. It teaches, happily, a 

 people specially intelligent, specially accustomed by their 

 Isusinesscs to the application of scientific laws. To them, 

 therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws would 

 have nothing strange in it. They have already, I doubt 

 not, that inductive habit of mind which is the groundwork 

 of all rational understanding or action. They would not 

 turn the deaf or contemptuous ear with which the stupid, 

 the savage, the superstitious, receive the revelations of 

 Nature's mysteries. Surely, with such a people to work 

 upon, it were well worth your while to expand your classes 

 of physiology, and give one or more of them a practical 

 turn in the direction of practical health. Your Animal 

 Physiology Class is, I doubt not, a sound and useful one. 

 It cannot well be otherwise, while its text-book is Prof. 

 Huxley's Elementary Lessons ; and 1 am glad to see that 

 your learned lecturer is about to confine himself, for the 

 present at least, to the physiology of the animal most 

 abundant in, and most important to, Birmingham, namely, 

 man. Twenty lectures are announced in your programme 

 dealing with the tissues of the body, their structure and 

 uses, circulation of the blood, respiration, chemical changes 

 in air respired, amount breathed, digestion, nature of food, 

 absorption, secretion, functions of the nervous system. 

 Now, this is as it should be. It is admirable. Teaching of 



