TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. "95 



I know it may be said that there are difficulties in the way, and especially practi- 

 cal difficulties ; hut I have always ohserved that people who ai-e good at finding out 

 difficulties, and especially practical difficidties, are like people who are good at 

 finding out excuses, — good at finding out very little else. The various ways of 

 getting over these difficulties are obvious enough, and have been hinted at or fully 

 expressed by several writers of gi-eater or less authority on many occasions. It is, 

 however, of some consequence that I should here say what I believe has not been 

 said before, namely, that a purely and exclusively literary education, imperfect and 

 one sided as it is, is still a better thing than a system of scientific instruction (to 

 abuse the use of the word for a moment) in which there should be no courses of 

 pi-actical familiarizing with natural objects, verification, and experimentation. A 

 purely literary training, say, in dialectics, or what we are pleased to call logic, to 

 take a flagi-aut and glaring instance first, does confer certain lower advantages upon 

 the person who goes through it without any discipline in the practical investigation 

 of actual problems. By going through such a training attentively, a man with a 

 good memory and a little freedom from over-scrupulousness, can convert his mind 

 into an arsenal of quips, quirks, retorts, and epigi'ams, out of which he can, at his 

 own pleasure, discharge a rnitraille of chopped straw and chaft-like arguments, 

 against which no man of ordinary fairness of mind can, for the moment, make 

 head. It is true that such sophists gain this dexterity at the cost of losing, inevery 

 case, the power of fairly and fully appreciating or investigating truth, of losing in 

 many cases the faculty of sustaining and maintaining serious attention to any sub- 

 ject, and of losing in some cases even the power of writing. A well-known cha- 

 racter in an age happily, though only recently, gone by, who may be taken as a 

 Caesar worthy of such Antonies, used to speak of a pen as his torpedo. Still they 

 have their reward, they succeed now and then in convincing juries, and they are 

 formidable at dinner-tables. It would not be fan-, however, not to say that a purely 

 literary training can do much better things than this. By a pm-ely classical edu- 

 cation a man, from being forced into seeing and feeling that other men could look 

 upon the world, moral, social, and physical, with other (even if not with larger) 

 eyes than ours, attains a certain flexibility of mind which enables him to enter into 

 the thoughts of other and living men ; and this is a very desirable attainment. 

 And, finally, though I should be sorry to hold with a French writer that the style 

 makes the man, the benefit of being early familiarized with wi-itings which the 

 peculiar social condition of the classical times, so well pointed out by De Toc- 

 queviUe (De la Democratic en Amerique, i. 15), conspired and contributed not a 

 little to make models of style, is not to be despised. Such a familiarity may not 

 confer the power of imitating or rivalling such compositions, but it may confer the 

 power of appreciating their excellences, the one power appearing to us to be ana- 

 logous to the power of the experimenter, and the other to that of the pure obser^ 

 ver in Natural Science ; and we should undervalue neither. 



Masters of Science, it must be confessed, are not always masters of style ; let 

 not the single instance of last night tempt you to generalize, it was but a single 

 instance, the writings of the man whom we in this Section are most of us likely 

 to look upon as our master in Science have been spoken of by our President in his 

 recently published volume as " intellectual pemmican ;" and if scientific reading 

 and teaching is to be divorced from scientific observation of natural objects and 

 processes, it is better that a man, yoimg or old, shoiild have in his niemoiy some- 

 thing which is perfect of its kind, entire and unmutilated, such as the opening 

 sentences of the ' Brutus ' of Cicero, which Tacitus, I think, must have had in his 

 memory when he vrrote his obituary of Agricola, or as the opening sentences of 

 the ' Republic ' of Plato, or the conclusion of the ' Ajax ' of Sophocles, than that he 

 should have his memory laden with a consignment of scientific phrases which, 

 ex hypothesi, have for him no vital reality. I have already said that I am strongly 

 of opinion that literary should always be combined with scientific instruction in a 

 perfect educational course ; these somewhat lengthy remarks refer therefore only 

 to systems in which it is proposed that we should have not only a bifurcation but 

 a radical separation of studies and students ; and the moral of this may be summed 

 up by saying that a purely scientific education must be a thoroughly practical one, 

 familiarizing the student with actual things as well as with words and symbols. 



