86 REPORT— 1888. 



waste his valuable time, and throw away labour which in nearly every 

 individual case would be most profitably spent in carefully studying andl 

 testing some important laws or principles of chemistry, and which would 

 make the student's knowledge of the subject thorough and personal. 

 Chemistry is essentially an experimental science. The great value of the 

 study of the whole subject lies in the practical work done and in the 

 method of building the theoretical structui-e on the practical knowledge. 

 It is therefore absolutely necessary to have a thoroughly good laboratory 

 with a lecture-T'oom attached, so that collective and individual work may 

 be carried on with equal facility. At the present time, in our schools and 

 colleges there is too much working for examinations, and the require- 

 ments to j^ass such examinations are as narrow as paper legislation can 

 make them. The student is for ever testing mixtures or performing 

 some exceedingly simple gravimetric analyses. He is tied down, has his 

 knowledge fettered instead of having it expanded, and never reaches the 

 more advanced and useful principles of chemical science, which he can 

 only dream of from the hearsay of his text-book.' 



LXV. ' There is no scale of value of the different parts of chemistry ; 

 there is no recognised system as to which should be taught first. I have 

 known boys obtain scholarships simply because their teacher had been 

 recently a pupil of their examiner and knew the kind of questions he was 

 likely to set. The ordinary text-books, lectures, and practical work do 

 but little for even the hardest worker. We want an authorised code of 

 work issued by a consensus of the highest authorities.' 



LXVI. ' I object strongly to boys in a laboratory being allowed to mix 

 different solutions in test-tubes, day after day, to find out whether pre- 

 cipitates are formed or not. I have a high Opinion of the advantages 

 derivable from the teaching of chemistry when none of the harder parts 

 are shirked, as a valuable mental discipline, and as giving, with drawing, 

 the best means of teaching an oi'dinary boy the use of his hands as well 

 as his head.' 



LXVII. ' The result of the absence of practice in quantitative experi- 

 ments is to create an unnatural breach in the minds of pupils between 

 the actual phenomena of chemical action and the theories by which such 

 phenomena are to be explained. It might be found possible to treat the 

 subject more logically if some attempt were made to teach the facts in a 

 more natural order. The historical sequence by which the science has; 

 attained its present proportions might form the basis of a rational 

 arrangement of the parts of the subject. In this way, by placing the 

 pupils in the attitude of mind of original discoverers, the logical necessity 

 of theories to account for the facts would give them more real meaning 

 and interest. I am not acquainted with a text-book suitable for school 

 use in which such an order is followed.' 



LXVIII. ' Boys have been lectured to as if they were students, thereby 

 producing a condition of things described by some writer as the perfect 

 paradise of a boys' school, where the masters learnt the lessons and the 

 boys heard them. Chemistry should be taught as everything else is- 

 taught — by making the boys do the work themselves — and the lesson 

 should be a system of question and answer.' 



LXIX. 'The calculation of chemical quantities, involving atomic 

 weights, ought to come quite late in the course, so that the atomic theory 

 is kept in the background at first. The pupil should make several experi- 

 ments on the diffusion of gases and liquids which will lead up to the idea 



