238 



NATURE 



{yuiv 15, 1880 



Last -week the subject was again introduced in the House 

 of Lords, with, as before, an unsatisfactory result. The 

 action of Government with reference to Scottish educa- 

 tional endowments is rather an impressive commentary 

 on the conduct of the obstructives who are so anxious to 

 reduce the standard of education in England. The effect 

 of the Scotch measure will be greatly to extend the means 

 of education for those who usually attend Board Schools 

 placing as it does at their disposal the education to be 

 obtained in secondary schools, an advantage, we should 

 think, likely to be largely taken advantage of. Until 

 some similar course be taken with reference to England 

 where so many valuable educational endowments have been 

 diverted from their legitimate purpose, it seerhstous cruel 

 rigidly to limit the function of elementary schools in refer 

 ence to pupils of exceptional promise. Still more cruel is 

 it to turn out the great bulk of the children with an 

 education quite unworthy of the name, and which renders 

 them little better fitted to cope with their surroundings 

 than if they were entirely unlettered. It is our boundcn 

 duty, since we insist on keeping children at school till a 

 certain age, to do the best we can for them ; and to turn 

 them out equipped with nothing more useful than the 

 three R's is a mere mockery of education. If reading 

 at all events, is to be a really useful acquisition, let 

 us make them understand that there are things quite as 

 wonderful and quite as well worth reading about as the 

 horrors of the penny dreadfuls. Many of these children; 

 the working men and working women of the future; 

 wiU have but little time to put the three R's to much use 

 whereas if well grounded in the elements of one or two of 

 the most useful of the sciences, they will have a continual 

 source of pleasure within themselves, requiring neither 

 books nor pens, but only the exercise of thoughtful obser- 

 vation. That education is admittedly the best which 

 enables one to cope most successfully with the difficulties 

 of his surroundings, and we cannot see how any candid 

 man will deny that for this purpose an accurate training 

 in the science of common things is worth all the books in 

 the world. That the Government system as at present 

 established commends itself to the sense of the people is 

 clear from the fact that Government schools are practi- 

 cally killing all competitors. As to the dread of the over- 

 education of the people, this is a bogy which only needs 

 to be stared at to vanish. Do we find any lack of men 

 and women to do all sorts of work in Germany or France, 

 or in any other country where the people have a really 

 substantial education ? In nearly every county of the 

 kingdom are local scientific societies, many of which are 

 composed mainly of working men who have educated 

 themselves into whatever they may know of science ; but 

 we have yet to hear that they are more discontented with 

 their position than unlettered Hodge. The real truth is, 

 as is too clearly shown on the Continent, the better 

 educated the working man is, the better workman docs 

 he turn out to be. The great mistake is to confound a 

 smattering with a grounding, and this, it seems to us, is 

 the mistake made by Lord Norton and those who side 

 with him, and possibly may account for the opposition to 

 the Fourth Schedule. The exclusive use of such a 

 reading-book as Lord Norton threatens to compile would 

 be the best help to a smattering education ; a very few 

 hours a week devoted to a few well-selected experiments. 



thejudicioususeofspecimensanddiagrams,a little training 

 of the observing faculties of children, and the systematic 

 teaching of the great elementary facts of one or two 

 sciences would be a welcome relief to the pupils, and 

 would do far more for their real education than a library 

 of reading-books. 



Sir John Lubbock has given notice that he will shortly 

 introduce the subject into the House of Commons ; it is 

 inconceivable that that body will permit anything like 

 retrogression in the matter of education ; they cannot do 

 so without being liable to the imputation of class legisla- 

 tion. At the best, our working men and working women, 

 it must be confessed, have a hard life of it, many of their 

 hardships resulting from ignorance of the commonest laws 

 and facts of nature. If we wish to make them contented 

 with their lot, let us lighten it by enlightening their minds 

 and giving them the means of making the best of their 

 circumstances. It is against the teaching of all history to 

 maintain that what the retrogressionists are pleased to 

 call over-education will lead to all sorts of political and 

 social evils. It is, history tells us plainly enough, the 

 ignorance, and not the enlightenment, of the people that 

 should be feared. The better educated we are all round 

 the more likely are we to keep our foremost place among 

 nations who have already, solely by the superior educa- 

 tion of all classes, got ahead of us in some important 

 respects, and the more likely are we to continue to advance 

 by gradual evolution instead of by violent revolution, 

 which always requires a large substratum of ignorance to 

 work v/ith. 



ARGENTINE ENTOMOLOGY 



Honiptcra Argentina enumeravit spccicsque novas 

 descripsit Carolus Berg (Curoniis). BonariK, ex 

 typographies Pauli E. Coni. Hamburgo, in biblopolio 

 gassmannii. (Frederking et Graf, 1879.) 



ENTOMOLOGY is finding a new centre in Buenos 

 Ayres ; synchronous with the first part of Dr. Bur- 

 meister's treatise on the Lepidoptera of the Argentine 

 Fauna, lately noticed in these columns, has appeared the 

 above work on the less popular and very much less known 

 order Rhynchota. In common with many entomologists, 

 we use this last term rather than that of Hemiptera, as 

 written by our author, for the following reasons. Linnajus 

 founded the order Hemiptera, but included therein non- 

 allied insects, to which the name Orthoptera was ultimately 

 applied by Olivier, whilst Fabricius was the first to separate 

 the true " bugs," under the name of Ryngota, which was 

 afterwards linguistically purified into Rhynchota. N ot only, 

 however, did the great Swedish naturalist first propound 

 the order Hemiptera, but we are also indebted to Sweden^ 

 in the person of the late Prof Stal, for gathering together 

 with critical and exhaustive care the descriptive work of 

 an intervening century, and, by the help of a splendid 

 collection formed at Stockholm, reducing the classification 

 to a system, and making the study of the order a possi- 

 bility. It is this system which is followed by Prof. Berg 

 in the modest work under notice, which is not a mono- 

 graph, but rather an enumeration of the known species, 

 accompanied by descriptions of new ones. The work is 

 therefore special in its character and classificatory in its 



