584 



NA TURE 



[October 8, 1908 



referring to some of the salient discoveries during this 

 period, he pointed out that each decade since has witnessed 

 a lengthening of the course, an increase hi the number of 

 subjects of examination, and a greater stringency in the 

 standard required. The modern curriculum is an attempt 

 to realise a scientific ideal. At every stage practical work 

 goes hand in hand with the teaching of theory. The result 

 is that, even with the present five years' minimal course, 

 anatomy, instead of being, as it used to be, the one 

 dominant subject of drill, has to take its place as one out 

 of five sciences in which laboratory work has to be done. 

 He then made some remarks on the mystery of life, hold- 

 ing that the physicochcmical hypothesis of life which has 

 come into vogue is inadequate. Evolution is the name 

 we give to the modal process of growth, but we are left 

 where we were as regards the mystery of origins, or of 

 the forces by which this process is brought about and 

 directed. But if the physicochcmical hypothesis is in- 

 competent to account for the mysteries of organisation, it 

 is still more inefficient as an e.Kplanation of the psycho- 

 logical processes of consciousness. 



Prof. Myers also delivered an introductory lecture on 

 the aims and position of experimental psychology, at the 

 close of which he dealt with what he described as the 

 inadequate provision of the University of London for the 

 teaching of psychology. The subject is recognised in six 

 separate courses of study in the University ; this distribu- 

 tion is harmful to its progress. It is an independent 

 science with methods which are distinctly its own. Vet 

 there is no bodv of professed psychologists within the 

 University. He pleaded for the institution of a board of 

 studies in psychology in order that the teaching of the 

 subject may be reorganised and coordinated. Describing 

 the provision made for the teaching of psychology on the 

 Continent and in the United .States, Dr. Myers showed that 

 London is conspicuously backward, and he said there are 

 not more than half a dozen medical men in the country 

 who could carry out such observations upon a patient as 

 would satisfy a psychologist. 



The Huxley lecture, on recent advances in science and 

 their bearing on medicine and surgery, was delivered at 

 Charing Cross Hospital by .Sir Patrick Manson, F.R.S. 

 The lecturer dealt first with the geographical limitation of 

 disease and the factors causing it — local and climatic con- 

 ditions, the presence of other forms of life which act as 

 intermediaries for the germ, &c. The principal tropical 

 diseases are caused either by protozoa or by helminths. So 

 far as we accurately know, none of the disease germs of 

 strictly tropical diseases is bacterial. Several bacterial 

 diseases which are often classed as tropical — for example, 

 cholera, certain kinds of dysentery, leprosy, plague, 

 Mediterranean fever, &c. — are not really tropical. Experi- 

 ence has shown that these diseases can flourish in any 

 climate. It is only because those hygienic and social con- 

 ditions most favourable to their spread are met with at the 

 present day in greatest perfection in the tropics that they 

 are conventionally regarded as tropical. 



At St. George's Hospital Dr. Slater took as the subject 

 for his address the laboratory in medical education and 

 practice, in which he demonstrated the growth of know- 

 ledge of morbid states consequent on investigations carried 

 out in the laboratory. It is quite certain that if the 

 maximum benefit is to be derived from the laboratories, 

 consultations between the clinician and the laboratory will 

 have to be more resorted to. 



At the Middlesex Hospital Mr. Rudyard Kipling pre- 

 sided, and Dr. Kellas delivered an address on the develop- 

 ment of medicine as a science, giving an interesting 

 account of the history of medicine from the earliest times. 



At St. Mary's Sir John Broadbent remarked on the 

 great advances that have been made in medicine, as in 

 surgery, in recent years, and deplored the tendency of 

 modern times to fly to the so-called remedies for every 

 ill now advertised widely in the daily Press. 



.Addresses were also delivered at the London School of 

 Medicine for Women by Dr. Sainsbury ; at University 

 College, Bristol, by Sir Rubert Boyce ; at the Uni- 

 versity of Manchester by Sir Clifford Allbutt ; and at the 

 Pharmaceutical Society by Mr. Harwood Lescher. 



NO. 2032, VOL. 78] 



THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 

 SECTION L. 



EDUCATION. 



OrtNiNG Address by Prof. L. C. Mi.all, D.Sc, F.R.S., 

 President of the Section. 



Useful Knowledge. 



I PRorosE to speak to you about Ujcful kr.'^.wledge, and 

 you will, I think, admit the importance and the appro- 

 priateness of the subject. But you may be surprised that 

 I venture upon so wide a theme. For my part, I maintain 

 that the extent of a subject gives no notion, however vague, 

 of the time required to discuss it. If you have a quarter 

 of an hour and a sheet of paper you may employ them 

 with about equal probability of success in delineating a 

 hand's breadth of greensward, or the British Isles, or the 

 whole world. Bossuet handled universal history from his 

 own point of view in a volume of no more than six 

 hundred octavo pages, and Buffon ' remarks, quite truly, 

 that every subject, no matter how vast, can be treated in 

 a single discourse. You will observe with satisfaction 

 that 1 deny myself the commonest and most plausible 

 excuse for an unduly prolonged address ; that, I mean, 

 which pleads the magnitude of the subject. 



1 do not wish to exaggerate the importance of useful 

 knowledge. It is not everything, nor yet the highest thing 

 in education. There are things which we rarely mention 

 in a British Association section, and which are perhaps 

 best left undiscussed, except where there is entire sym- 

 pathy between speaker and hearer ; some of these stand 

 above useful knowledge of every kind. But the fact that 

 useful knowledge occupies nearly all the school-time shows 

 its practical importance, and disposes us to welcome any 

 means of making it more effective. 



Book-learning.' 



The knowledge of books may be an excellent form of 

 useful knowledge ; it may also, when it strives merely to 

 record and remember, be unproductive and stupefying. 

 Let me give you an example, by no means an unfavour- 

 able one, of the book-learning which becomes sterile for 

 lack of method and aim. My example shall be the elder 

 Pliny, Pliny the naturalist, who lost his lite in an erup- 

 tion of Vesuvius, and w'hose many virtues were piously 

 described by his nephew, Pliny the younger. The elder 

 Pliny wrote a voluminous Natural History, and left behind 

 him 160 books of unused extracts. His appetite for read- 

 ing was insatiable. Reading filled all the hours which 

 could be spared from public duties or snatched from sleep. 

 Once, when a friend interrupted the reader to correct a 

 mispronunciation, Pliny asked, " Did you not under- 

 stand?" "Yes." "Then why did you interrupt? You 

 have made us lose ten lines." The Natural History com- 

 piled during years of such reading is wholly uncritical ; 

 any testimony is good enough for the most improbable 

 story. We look in vain for interpretation, combination, 

 or inference. Ttje facts are indeed rudely sorted, usually 

 according to subjects, but sometimes alphabetically. The 

 chief use of Pliny's Natural History has been to promote 

 the fabrication of more books of the same kind. 



Pliny, with his unlimited appetite for knowledge and 

 his very limited power of using it, might seem to have 

 been taken as a pattern by scholars. Like him, they have 

 amassed knowledge in heaps. It has been the ambition 

 of many scholars to read everything that was worth read- 

 ing, and to fill great volumes with the imperfectly digested 

 fragments. 



In the ages of learning, the schoolmaster too became a 

 pedant. His chief duty he supposed to consist in furnish- 

 ing his boys with knowledge which they might some day 



1 " Discours a rAciflL-mie." 



2 In the preparation of this Address I have been much embarraFsed bv 

 the inexactness of the terms used to denote different studies. Some, such 

 as science, literature, S;c , include both process and product, which is as if 

 we had but one name for weaving and cloth. The accepted names of the 

 divisions of knowledge are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive : they 

 are not so much logical terms as names of occupations, each nf which might 

 well occupy one man's time. We acquiesce in such anomalies because we 

 feel the need of brief and comprehensive expressions, and find that bad de- 

 finitions are not so intolerable as cumbrous and unfamiliar terms. 



