434 
out that it was not till 1870 that England established a 
system of education at all, and that now, while all great 
countries, except our own, have Ministers of Education, 
we have only Ministers who are managers of primary 
schools. 
Passing on to the State need of abstract knowledge, we 
read as follows :— 
“Ali, the son-in-law of Mahomet, the fourth successor 
to the Caliphate, urged upon his followers that men of 
science and their disciples give security to human pro- 
gress. Ali loved to say, ‘Eminence in science is the 
highest of honours ;’ and ‘ He dies not who gives life to 
learning.’ In addressing you upon texts such as these 
my purpose was to show how unwise it is for England to 
lag in the onward march of science when most other 
European Powers are using the resources of their States 
to promote higher education and to advance the bound- 
aries of knowledge. English Governments alone fail to 
grasp the fact that the competition of the world has 
become a competition in intellect.” 
We have seen how Sir Lyon Playfair twits the heads of 
the Education Department with being merely managers 
of primary schools. The President of the Chemical 
Section, Prof. Armstrong, also shows reason why their 
functions must be expanded if science is ever to get on 
here. He holds that without State action the difficulties 
which at present prevent the existing teaching institutions 
from exercising their full share of influence upon the 
advancement of our national prosperity are all but in- 
superable. He foresees the objection that such an inter- 
ference would deprive teaching-centres of their indi- 
viduality, but he denies that this must necessarily follow, 
and we know no one who has a better right to express an 
opinion on such a subject. 
Some part indeed of Prof. Armstrong's address is 
terrible reading. The present chemical education and 
chemical examinations in this country are, according to 
him, to a large extent shams, and worse. The students 
who come to the centres of higher instruction are scarcely 
reasoning beings—they have never been brought to reason; 
and at those centres the instruction has been of too 
technical a character, while hardly anywhere is there an 
atmosphere of research. We commend this part of 
Prof. Armstrong’s address strongly to our readers. He 
points out, among many other matters, the vital import- 
ance of the research atmosphere, and he frankly states the 
difficulties felt by earnest men. On this point, indeed, 
we think him a little too sensitive. Many of the remarks 
so often made now touching the absence of research in 
our chemical laboratories apply not to such men as him, 
but to those whose trading spirit and proclivities are well 
known—men who discredit the profession to which they 
belong. Still, it is well that the difficulties should be 
fairly recorded, especially in juxtaposition with a state- 
ment that absence of research must always indicate the 
absence of teaching worthy of the name. 
A complete revision of the present system, both of 
teaching and examining in chemistry, is, therefore, ac- 
cording to Prof. Armstrong, one of the most pressing of 
our present needs. 
Are the other sciences better off? Certainly not 
mathematics if Prof. Chrystal has a right to speak for 
that branch: 
NATURE 
| Sept. to, 1885 
“All men practically engaged in teaching who have 
learned enough, in spite of the defects of their own early 
training, to enable them to take a broad view of the 
matter, are agreed as to the canker which turns every- 
thing that is good in our educational practice to evil. It 
is the absurd prominence of written competitive examina- 
tions that works all this mischief.” 
But some may think that in the setting of problems 
mathematics teachers have an advantage over others in 
preventing unintelligent cramming. This is not Prof. 
Chrystal’s opinion : 
“The history of this matter of problems, as they are 
called, illustrates in a singularly instructive way the weak 
point of our English system of education. They origin- 
ated, I fancy, in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos Ex- 
amination, as a reaction against the abuses of cramming 
bookwork, and they have spread into almost every branch 
of science teaching—witness test-tubing in chemistry. At 
first they may have been a good thing; at all events the 
tradition at Cambridge was strong in my day, that he 
that could work the most problems in three or two and a 
half hours was the ablest man, and, be he ever so ignorant 
of his subject in-its width and breadth, could afford to 
despise those less gifted with this particular kind of 
superficial sharpness. But, in the end, came all to the 
same : we were prepared for problem-working in exactly 
the same way as for bookwork. We were directed to 
work through old problem papers, and study the style 
and peculiarities of the day and of the examiner. The 
day and the examiner had, in truth, much to do with it, 
and fashion reigned in problems as in everything else. 
The only difference I could ever see between problems 
and bookwork was the greater predominance of the in- 
spiriting element of luck in the former. This advantage 
was more than compensated for by the peculiarly dis- 
jointed and, from a truly scientific point of view, worthless 
nature of the training which was employed to cultivate 
this species of mental athletics. The result, so far as 
problems worked in examinations go, is, after all, very 
miserable, as the reiterated complaints of examiners 
show ; the effect on the examinee is a well-known ener- 
vation of mind, an almost incurable superficiality, which 
might be called Problematic Paralysis—a disease which 
unfits a man to follow an argument extending beyond the 
length of a printed octavo page.” 
As to the crying present need, Profs. Chrystal and 
Armstrong are at one. We want a higher ideal of educa- 
tion 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 ofliving men. It 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, whe 
shall help our race to keep its place in the struggle of 
