950 REPORT— 1885. 
ful teachers, and especially to those who are called upon to fulfil the painful duties of 
an examiner. The railway booli-stalls have made us acquainted with ‘Confessions ” 
of all sorts, but if the ‘ Confessions of an Examiner’ were to be written they would 
be far more heartrending than any. The examiner in chemistry, let him go where 
he will, scarcely dare ask a question to which the answer cannot be directly read 
out from a text-book. He will be told ‘that such and such a compound is formed 
by the action of so and so upon so and so,’ but he will usually find blank ignorance 
of the phrase ‘by the action of, and as to the mode of performing the operation. 
The examiner would, however, be bound to agree with the teacher that it is almost 
impossible to induce students to seek information outside the lecture-room, and 
except in the ordinary cram text-books, and that it is hopeless to expect them to 
devote attention to anything unless it will pay in a subsequent examination—in 
fact that the old university spirit of acquiring knowledge for its own sake is almost 
unknown among our science students. Herein lies one of the teacher’s most 
serious difficulties, as he is more often than not bound to teach in a particular way, 
or to teach certain subjects, in entire opposition to his own views, in order to quality 
his students to pass a particular examination: forexample, many of our colleges now 
distinctly state that their courses are intended to qualify students to pass the exami- 
nations of the London University, and hence they are governed by the requirements of 
that university, which vary more or less as the examiners are periodically changed. 
The examiner, on the other hand, is often placed in a difficult position: it is clear 
to him that the system under which the students he is called upon to examine have 
been taught is a bad one: yet he feels that he has no right to set questions such as 
he honestly believes should direct the teaching into proper channels, because he 
knows that the teacher is immovable, and it is not fair to make the examinees 
the victims of a system for which they are not responsible. Hence, perforce, the 
teacher goes on teaching badly and the examiner examining badly. Difficulties of 
this kind are bound to make themselves felt at a transition period like the present, 
and will only disappear if we recognise the grave responsibility which rests upon 
ourselves and improve our methods of teaching and our text-books : these latter, in 
too many instances, are unsuited to modern requirements, and are being made worse 
by stereotyping, and the practice which is gradually creeping in of merely changing 
the date on the title page and the numeral before the word ‘edition,’ thus en- 
gendering the belief that the information is given up to date. 
Both in teaching and examining two important changes ought forthwith to be 
made: our students ought at the very beginning of their career to become familiar 
with the use of the balance; and the imaginary distinction between so-called 
inorganic and organic compounds should be altogether abandoned. I do not mean 
that students should be taught quantitatiye analysis as ordinarily understood, but 
that instead of endeavouring to make clear to them by explanation only the 
meaning of terms such as equivalent, for example, we should set them to perform 
a few simple quantitative exercises in determining equivalents, &c. It can easily 
be done, and terms which otherwise long remain mythical acquire a real meaning 
in the student’s mind. That the elements of the chemistry of carbon compounds 
do not find a place at a very early period in the course of instruction is one of 
those riddles eonnected with our system which it is impossible to answer. Attention 
was once pithily directed to the fact in my hearing by a scientific friend—not a 
chemist—who said he had often felt astonished that, although he had learnt a good 
deal of chemistry, the chemistry of the breakfast-table was practically a sealed 
book to him, common salt being the one object of which he felt he knew something. 
I may here urge that there is one great error which we must avoid in the future, 
that of overworking our students, in the sense of obliging them to pay attention to 
too many subjects at atime. Thisis done more or less, I believe, in all our science 
schools, and medical students are peculiarly unfortunate in this respect. It is to 
some extent necessitated by the deficient preliminary education of our students; 
but I believe that I am justified in stating that it is also partly, perhaps mainly, 
due to the fact that the curriculum is too often imposed by lecturers who are 
directly interested in the attendance of students at their lectures. This is one of 
the great difficulties in the way of higher education, and the continuance of the 
