NA TURE 



{Jan. 20, ibS; 



and its inhabitants. The two remaining papers are mainly 

 geological, one being on the geography of Persia, by Dr. Tietze, 

 the other the conclusion of Dr. Diener's paper on the hypso- 

 metry of Central Syria. 



EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE IN SCHOOLS 

 AND UNIVERSITIES 

 pROF. G. F. FITZGERALD, as Vice-President of the 

 Dublin University Experimental Science Association, 

 delivered an address at the opening meeting, held on November 

 23 in tlie Museum Buildings of Trinity College, under the pre- 

 sidency of the Rev. the Provost, on "Experimental Science in 

 Schools and Universities." 



_ Prof. Fitzgerald, at the outset of his address, dealt with the 

 history of Universities, and showed how they gave such pre- 

 ponderance to book as against experimental knowledge. 'That 

 had led, the Professor continued, to a dual system of education 

 — the professional and the commercial. That gap between the 

 classes was much ^ to be lamented, and necessitated, from a 

 political point of view, the desirability of having all classes edu- 

 cated in the same in-titutions. The commercial classes would 

 not, however, enter the Universities at present, because they 

 required to be taut;ht useful subjects, and they would not learn 

 the Latin and Greek now required in our Universities. From 

 the political side of the question, he thought, they had got these 

 results — that they must be content to have useful subjects taught 

 in their schools and Universities if the schools and Universities 

 were to be used by the large body in the country who were will- 

 ing and able to pay for it. What they must have, if possible, 

 wa-, a single school and college system for all classes of the com- 

 munity who were able to speml the first twenty years or so of 

 their life in education, and they ought to have a system that was 

 complete, a training which gave both those who could not afiord 

 to go on the whole length up to twenty years, and which ought 

 to be able to train those who desired to go on for the higher 

 culture. Returning to the education side of the question, he 

 insisted that almost the whole importance was as to how the 

 subject was taught. He thought the use of the Latin Grammar 

 had been reduced to a very good system, but he thought it 

 was perfectly evident from the course that things were taking 

 and the reasonableness of things, that they must teach their 

 youth some knowledge of science. People who felt responsi- 

 bility in the matter were being more and more convinced that 

 it was not right for them to allow their children to grow up 

 ignorant of the laws of the world in which they live. Others 

 made answer to that that they left those laws of the world to the 

 doctors. But how were they to know under what circumstances 

 it was well to consult a specialist ? It was very necessary for us 

 to have a knowledge when we required to consult a doctor. 

 Hundreds of people were killed by ignorance of the fact that 

 dirt was the cause of disease. That was a very elementary sub- 

 ject. Nevertheless, people were dying every day from ignorance 

 of that very fact ; and, unless they were taught to believe in the 

 fact that there were laws of Nature, they would not believe that 

 dirt was the cause of disease, because they saw some people 

 living in dirt and yet not the victims of disease. He thought 

 that tmie for teaching science must be found for these two 

 reasons— it was necessary that our youth should learn the laws 

 of the world in which they live, and that they also should learn 

 how to discover those laws. Unless our people were taught the 

 laws under which plants and animals were best growli, the 

 people of other countries would rival them in the manufacture of 

 butter and beef, and the result would be that our people must 

 starve. Another advantage of such training was to prevent 

 superstition such as that of the people of Spain, who prefeiTcd 

 the use of charms as a safeguard against cholera to the cleansing 

 of their wells. AH the 'classes of the country required thil 

 traming— they would die without it, so they must have it. 



Having shown that the cultivation of Latin and Greek 

 was originally with the view of acquiring the information 

 contamed in the ancient books in those languages, the Pro- 

 fessor combated the five reasons formulated by the German 

 professoriate as to why they thought that the cultivation of 

 Latin and Greek was so important, observing, with regard to 

 the fourth reason — that these languages were the best varied 

 exercise in thinking— that if the connection between words and 

 ideas was a thing that must be taught in every system of educa- 

 tion, his impression was that t nat would be a great deal better 



attained by describing accurately and thinking out the conse- 

 quences of physical experiment. In choosing the sciences that 

 they should teach, there were three conditions that should be 

 fulfilled. First of .all, the sciences chosen ought to be within 

 the grasp of children, because it was highly important that the 

 science begun with childhood should be continued on in the 

 University days ; secondly, it ought not to require any expensive 

 apparatus, because schools and people who trained children 

 could not be expected to buy elaborate .apparatus, and children 

 could not be expected to work with them satisfactorily ; and, 

 thirdly, he thought the sciences should be chosen so as to be 

 concerned with a large number of the laws of the world in which 

 we live. There were two large branches of science which in- 

 cluded nearly all the laws of the world, namely, the physical 

 and the biological ; and, therefore, he thought it would be 

 desirable to choose two sciences — one on the physical and 

 one on the biological side, so that children might learn some- 

 thing about the laws of living things, and something about 

 the laws of physical things. He therefore suggested chemistry 

 and botany, and he thought the whole weight of their efforts 

 should be devoted to trying to get the children in schools to learn 

 the elements of chemistry and the elements of botany, for there 

 were no other two sciences the elements of which were almost 

 similar, and at the same time there were no other two sciences 

 that led up to a greater number of the laws of life, nor that gave 

 a wider and more extended view of the laws of the world in 

 which we live. The objections to the present system of teach- 

 ing a knowledge of experimental science was that it almost 

 entirely concentrated the person's attention upon pheno- 

 mena instead of upon reasoning. Therefore, in choosing 

 their system of teaching, all their weight ought to be 

 thrown into making sure that their plan had the eft'ect 

 of making the child learn to think a good deal. An- 

 other thing they had to consider was the enormous time that 

 children were made to remain in schoil without being engaged 

 in anything except mischief He thought a child should n .t 

 spend more than four hours a day at literary work. Well, that 

 occupied but a small part of a child's day ; and one of the great 1 

 advantages of having experimental subjects introduced into I 

 school teaching would be that they were subjects at which a 

 child could work without experiencing very much fatigue. He 

 could not help calling attention to the flagrant abu^e of the 

 teaching of experimental science in Irish schools. Experimental 

 science in Irish fchools was very nearly the s.ame as snakes in 

 Iceland. Having pointed out the fallacy of an examination — as 

 exemplified in the Intermediate Education system — that was 

 satisfied with a reading of the musical signs unwedded to a 

 knowledge of the sounds they represented, the Professor said it 

 would be an enormous advantage if the Intermediate Commis- 

 sioners could be induced to keep up a peripatetic system of 

 periodical examinations that would insist upon practical know- 

 ledge. That, however, should not interfere with the giving of 

 papers also. After observing that it was at the present time 

 impossible to carry out a proper examination in laboratory work, 

 and stating that he considered it would be very desirable that 

 the actual work in the laboratory and analyses in practical sub- 

 jects should count towards the University prizes, Mr. Fitzgerald 

 said he con-idered that the present system of analy.sis was not 

 very satisfactory, and he urged the introduction of a system that 

 would teach chemistry practically. Though that might be 

 harder to teach than Latin and Greek, it would not be so if 

 they had a system worked out and teachers to promote it, and 

 it would have the inestimable .advantage th.at, in addition to 

 training the child to think — which he thought it would do 

 equally well with Latin and Greek — it would teach him the 

 laws of things, and how to see and learn the laws of things. 

 It would also teach the child to use language to express 

 real ideas, and not merely phrases. They would also learn a 

 good deal more of the laws of language from a modern language 

 that they learned with the grain than ihey would by learning an 

 ancient language against the grain. He thought that literature 

 and history were co-ordinate with science, and they certainly 

 ought to be a large part of education. Literature and history 

 were grievously neglected in the present day — practically they 

 had no place, and that was substantially because Latin and Greek 

 were supposed to be a literary education. One of the reasons 

 was that those subjects were hard to examine in, but there was 

 an easy way out of that difficulty in Universities. They need not 

 examine, but they could require attendance at lectures — attend- 

 ance on good lecturers ; and the student would pick up more 



