NAIURR 



165 



THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 1880 



A STEP BACKWARDS 



WE are glad that Sir John Lubbock has given notice 

 that he will call attention to the Education Code 

 and move a resolution, unless indeed the Government 

 themselves are sufficiently wide awake, patriotic, and 

 liberal in its best sense, to step in and prevent Lord 

 Norton's resolution in the House of Lords the other day 

 from attaining the issue desiredby the educational obstruc- 

 tionists. Lord Norton's hostility to popular education is 

 notorious, and on Friday he had the honour of being 

 supported by several reverend bishops, who are supposed 

 officially to yearn after the highest welfare of the people. 

 The effect of Lord Norton's resolution would be to cut 

 out everything like real education and training from our 

 elementary schools, and leave nothing but the minimum 

 of instruction in the three R's. It' seems hard to have to 

 go over the old ground again, and to show that the 

 pittance of education which Lord Norton and those who 

 side with him would allow the vast majority of the 

 children of the nation, is really no education at all. The 

 objection apparently of Lord Norton to the retention 

 of the specific subjects of the fourth schedule is that 

 their introduction has been too successful ; that in 

 some schools the talents of a few pupils under this 

 system have been so developed that they have been 

 continued at school beyond the age of fourteen. Con- 

 sidering the ample opportunities which charity has pro- 

 vided for the education of the children of the class to 

 which Lord Norton and his supporters belong, it seems 

 to us mean in them to grudge the pittance expended by 

 the country in encouraging a few hundred clever boys of 

 the humbler classes to pursue their education to a degree 

 for which they have shown special aptitude. We are 

 especially surprised to find^among the supporters of Lord 

 Norton's motion the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, 

 who thus condemns the very code which was drawn up 

 under his auspices and which was worked under his 

 superintendence for five or six years without any apparent 

 suspicion on his part that it was not the best possible of 

 all codes. Of course our enlightened statesmen would 

 never stoop to degrade a subject of such national 

 importance into a party question, and therefore the 

 Duke of Richmond and the other enlightened and 

 reverend supporters of the persistent opponent of 

 popular education, did not surely realise the effects 

 of their vote. The real aim of Lord Norton's reso- 

 lution, there can be no doubt, is to stifle air training in 

 science out of elementary education. We trust Sir John 

 Lubbock will have an opportunity of speaking on the 

 subject in the House of Commons, and reminding our 

 legislators of some of the facts in his impressive speech 

 of 1877. They evidently require to be reminded of what 

 the real object of education is. Mere reading, writing, 

 and arithmetic is but a poor and inefficient equipment for 

 those who will have throughout life the hardest struggle 

 with their physical surroundings. Crime and disease, it 

 has been again and again proved, are more the result of 

 ignorance than of anything else — ignorance, not of the 

 three R's so much as ignorance of our own bodies and of 

 Vol. xxn. — No. 556 



the laws of that nature by which we are surrounded and of 

 which we form part. In a former discussion in Parliament 

 on this subject Mr. Playfair showed that many people 

 were appalled by the mere name of science as connected 

 with education, as if it were something beyond the com- 

 prehension of any but a select few, and far too remote 

 from human interests to be of any use in a system of 

 elementary education. But Mr. Playfair also showed that 

 what was meant was merely natural knowledge, a know- 

 ledge of the facts and laws of nature, a knowledge of our 

 own bodies and of the things outside our bodies with 

 which daily every one comes in contact. In the speech 

 already referred to by Sir John Lubbock, and reprinted 

 in his " Political Addresses," he shows that grammar and 

 even history, as ordinarily taught, are far more difficult 

 and much less interesting than the elements of natural 

 knowledge, which he maintains ought to be introduced 

 into our elementary schools. Much more, he shows, 

 could be advanced against the utility of teaching grammar 

 than against teaching the elements of physiology or 

 domestic or political economy ; and history, as taught in 

 most text-books, is a farrago of figures, crimes, murders, 

 and battles. Lord Norton is evidently so completely 

 ignorant of the real nature of science — which has to do 

 with tangible, hard, every-day facts— that he thinks all that 

 is necessary might be learned from a judiciously compiled 

 reading-book. The fact is no book of any kind need be 

 required by a competent teacher, and the whole aim and 

 end of science teaching would be missed if it dealt with 

 words and not things. 



If it is desired to turn out men and women with well- 

 trained, observant minds, fitted to grapple with the 

 circumstances of the every-day life of the bulk of the 

 people of this country, then the education which results 

 from an acquisition of some of the most elementary laws 

 and facts of nature is absolutely necessary. Moreover it 

 has been clearly shown that in schools where a little 

 science is properly taught the pupils are much further 

 advanced as readers than in schools where there is no 

 variety apart from the old-fashioned three R's. We 

 cannot believe that Lord Norton's resolution will meet 

 with any support outside the House of Lords ; should it 

 reach the House of Commons we are sure that body will 

 have too much respect for the bulk of its constituents 

 to insult and injure them by approving of any such 

 retrogressive step. 



FRESHWATER RHIZOPODS OF NORTH 

 AMERICA 



United States Geological Survey of the Territories 



Freshwater Rhizopods of North America. By Joseph 



Leidy, M. D., Professor of Anatomy in the University of 



Pennsylvania and of Natural History in Swarthmore 



College, Pennsylvania. (Washington : Government 



Printing Office, 1879.) 



"T^HE scientific histoiy of the freshwater rhizopods 



- begins only a little anterior to the Declaration of 



Independence. Rosel (1755) knew of the existence of such 



forms, which puzzled him. Linnaeus (1760) named one of 



them Volvox chaos;— polymorpho-jimtaiilis, the form of 



whose body was /'/■^/c'o inconstaiitior. But with the increase 



in the powers of the objectives used with the microscope, 



[I 



