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TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION A. 8o3 
example, who was plucked in his M.A. examination, and justly so if ever man was, 
by the unanimous verdict of three examiners, wrote me an indignant letter because: 
he believed, or was assured, that the paper set by the examiners could not have 
been answered out of Todhunter’s Elementary Algebra. I have nothing to say, of 
course, against that or any other text-book, but who put it into the poor young 
man’s head that the burden lay with me to prove that the examination in question 
ought to contain nothing but what is to be found in Todhunter’s Elementary 
Algebra? The course of this kind of reasoning is plain enough, and is often 
developed in the newspapers with that charming simplicity which is peculiar to 
honest people who are, at the same time, very ignorant and very unthinking. 
First, it follows that lectures should contain nothing but what is to be found in 
every text-book ; secondly, lectures are therefore useless, since it is all in the text- 
book; thirdly, the examination should allude to nothing that is not in the text- 
books, because that would be unfair; fourthly, which is the coach or crammer’s 
deduction, there should be nothing in the text-book that is not likely to be set in 
the examination. The problem for the writer of a text-book has come now, in 
fact, to be this—to write a booklet so neatly trimmed and compacted that no coach, 
on looking through it, can mark a single passage which the candidate for a minimum 
pass can safely omit. Some of these text-books I have seen, where the scientific 
matter has been, like the lady’s waist in the nursery song, compressed ‘so gent and 
sma’,’ that the thickness of it barely, if at all, surpasses what is devoted to the 
publisher’s advertisements. We shall return, I verily believe, to the Compendium 
of Martianus Capella. The result of all this is that science, in the hands of 
specialists, soars higher and higher into the light of day, while educators and 
the educated are left more and more to wander in primeval darkness. 
When our system sets such mean ends before the teacher, and encourages such 
unworthy conceptions of education, is it to be wondered at that the cry arises 
that pupils degenerate beneath even the contemptible standards of our examinations ? 
These can hardly be made low enough to suit the popular taste. It is no merit of 
the system we pursue, but due simply to the better among our teachers, men many 
of them who work for little reward and less praise, that we have not come to a 
worse pass already. Some even of the much-abused crammers have conceptions of 
a teacher's duty far higher than the system-mongers of the day, whom it is their 
special business to outwit; and it is but fair to allow to such of these also as 
deserve it part of the credit of stemming the torrent of degeneration. We place 
our masters in positions such that their very bread depends upon their doing what 
many of them know and will acknowledge to be wrong. Their excuse is, ‘ We do 
so and so because of the examination.’ 
The cure for all this evil is simply to give effect to a higher ideal of education 
in general, and of scientific education in particular. Science cannot live among 
the people, and scientific education cannot be more than a wordy rehearsal of dead 
text-books, unless we have living contact with the working minds of living men. 
Tt takes the hand of God to make a great mind, but contact with a great mind will 
make a little mind greater. The most valuable instruction in any art or science 
is to sit at the feet of a master, and the next best to have contact with another 
who has himself been so instructed. No agency that I have ever seen at work 
can compare for efficiency with an intelligent teacher, who has thoroughly made 
his subject his own. It'is by providing such, and not by sowing the dragon’s 
teeth of examinations, that we can hope to raise up an intelligent generation 
of scientifically educated men, who shall help our race to keep its place in the 
struggle of nations. In the future we must look more to men and to ideas, and 
trust less to mere systems. Systems have had their trial. In particular, systems 
of examination haye been tested and found wanting in nearly every civilised 
country on the face of the earth. Backward as we are here, we are stirring. 
The University of London, after rendering a great service to the country by forcing 
the older universities to give up the absurd practice of restricting their advan- 
tages to persons professing a particular shade of religious belief, has for many years 
pursued its career as a mere examining body. It has done so with rare advantages 
‘in the way of Government aid, efficient organisation, and an unsurpassed staff 
