490 



NATURE 



\Oct. 17, 1872 



this kind ought, and will in some more civilised society, be 

 held as a necessary element in the school course of every 

 child; just as important as reading, writing-, and arithmetic ; 

 and is the most necessary and most important branch of 

 technical education, namely, the act of keeping yourselves 

 alive and well. But you can hardly stop short there. 

 After you have taught the conditions of health, should you 

 not te.ach also somewhat of the causes of disease — of 

 those diseases, especially, which tend to lower wholesale 

 the physical condition of dwellers in towns, exposed to the 

 unhealthy influences of an artificial life .'' Should you not 

 teach young men and women something of the causes of 

 pestilence, of zymotic disease, and of scrofula, consump- 

 tion, cerebral derangement, dipsomania, and such like ? 

 Should you not show them the value of pure air, pure 

 water, unadulterated food, wholesome dwellings.'' We 

 want set up in the centre of large towns — it will not come 

 yet, but it will come some day — a statue to the goddess of 

 purity. Is there one of them, man or woman, who would 

 not be the safer himself and the more useful to his 

 neighbours if he had acquired some sound notions about 

 those questions of drainage on which their lives and the 

 lives of their childi-en may any day depend. I say women 

 as well as men ; ay, women even more than men. For it 

 is the women who have the ordering of the household, the 

 women who have the bringing up of the children. And 

 if any say, as they have a right to say, ' But these are 

 subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in 

 public lectures,' I reply, ' Of course, unless they are 

 taught by women — women, of course, duly educated and 

 legally qualified.' Let them tell young women what every 

 young woman ought to know, and what her parents will 

 very properly object to her hearing from men, or in the 

 company of men. This is one of the main reasons why I 

 have for twenty years past, and shall as long as I live, 

 advocated the training of ladies for the medical profes- 

 sion. And now, I am seeing the common sense of 

 England, and, indeed, of every civilised nation, coming 

 round to that which seemed to me, when I first conceived 

 of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished, save in 

 secret ; and I trust soon to sec a supply of lady-doctors, 

 sufficient to fulfil that old dream of mine, and to establish 

 in every great town of these islands health classes for 

 women. 



" Now why should not your Institute, which has 

 taken the initiative in so many useful enterprises, take 

 the initiative in this too ? It is already a school of many 

 things. Why should it not be also a school of health — a 

 school of sanitary science ? Why should it not send forth 

 year by year more and more young men and women, taught 

 not only to take care of their own health and that of their 

 families, but to exercise moral influence in the same direc- 

 tion over their fellow-citizens — to advocate as one simple, 

 and yet most necessary and important, good deed, the 

 teaching of the laws of health in every school, from the 

 highest to the most elementary ? Do that. Send forth 

 healthy pupils yearly, champions in the battle against 

 dirt and drunkenness, disease and death, and 

 you will raise a yet prouder title to the gratitude of 

 your fellow-countrymen than you have earned already by 

 your scientific zeal and your noble liberality. There are 

 those who may answer — or rather there would have been 

 those who would certainly have answered, five and twenty 

 years ago, before the so-called materialism of advanced 

 science had taught us some practical wisdom about educa- 

 tion — ' And if it were so, what matter ? i\Iind makes the 

 man, not body. We do not want our children to be 

 stupid giants and bravos, but clean, able, highly-educated, 

 however delicately Providence or the laws of Nature may 

 have been pleased to make them. Let theni overstrain 

 their brains a little, let them contract their chests, and 

 injure their digestion and their eyes, by sitting at desks 

 and poring over books. Intellect is what we want, and 

 intellect makes money ; intellect rules the world. I would 



rather see my son a genius than an athlete.' And so 

 would I. But what if for want of obeying the laws of 

 Nature you got neither genius nor athlete, but generally an 

 incapable, unhappy personage ? Without healthy bodies 

 you will not, in the long run, get healthy intellects. . . 

 Wherever you have a population generally weakly, stunted, 

 scrofulous, you will find in them a corresponding type of 

 brain which cannot be trusted to do good work. It may 

 be very active, it may be very quick in catchi ng up new 

 and grand ideas — all the more quick on account of its own 

 secret malaise and self-disconlent ; but will be spasmodic, 

 irritable, hysterical. It will be apt to mistake capacity of , 



talk for capacity of action, excitement for earnestness, ■ 

 virulence for force, and cruelty for justice. It will lose I 

 manful independence, individuality, originality, and when ^ 

 men act they will act from the consciousness of personal 

 weakness, leaning against each other, swaying about in 

 mobs and masses." 



We sincerely hope that the publicity which has been 

 given by the public press to this address by Canon 

 Kingsley will be the means of awakening the minds of 

 many to the vital importance of that scientific training 

 which he, in common with every enlightened mind, 

 advocates. 



MARTIN ON MICROSCOPIC MOUNTING 



A Manual of Microscopic Mounting. By J. H. Martin. 



(J. and A. Churchill.) 



SCIENCE in this country is certainly under great 

 obligations to ainatiUrs, or dilettanti as they are 

 more correctly called. The fact is there are in Great Britain 

 but a very few men of science, that is to say, men profes- 

 sionally devoted to scientific careers, as 'compared w-ith 

 Germany and even France — we are very poor in this 

 source of power. Germany has a host of universities and 

 high-schools in each one of which there are moie men 

 whose lives are definitely told off to the cultivation of 

 science, than there are in our greatest and richest seats of 

 learning. Dilettantism is the fashion of some branches of 

 science in this country, and under it they have thriven in 

 a way of which we maybe to som; extent proud; but 

 which seems 'i'cely enough to impede greatly their more 

 systematic cultivation. Geology has perhaps more than 

 any science benefited by the patronage of (//^V/rt/i// ; but 

 it is not difficult to foresee the time when its problems 

 will have become too arduous for any but trained and 

 devoted specialists to make any way with them. The 

 same is to a less extent true for the biological sciences, in 

 which, besides the enthusiastic field-naturalists, the mem- 

 bers of the medical profession have been conspicuous as 

 dilettanti explorers. At the time when (some five and 

 twenty years ago) the microscope was first brought to a 

 state of efficiency in this country, a perfect army of ama- 

 teurs entered the fields of animal and vegetable histology, 

 equipped with the beautiful and costly instrument, and 

 brought to light a considerable number of important facts 

 bearing on the structure of tissues and the minuter forms 

 of life. This was not the case on the Continent, the cost- 

 liness of the instrument, in addition to the other causes 

 which make Englishmen remarkable as scientitic dilettanti, 

 tending to limit the movement to this country. The taste 

 for amusement with the microscope has by no means 

 diminished of late years, the sales of instruments by 

 English makers being something astonishing in point of 



