826 REPORT— 1902, 



battleship ; if we consider what has been spent on the war in South Africa ; if we 

 consider the extent to which the value of the fuel at our disposal would be increased 

 if we could only double the efficiency of our engines and of our stoves, Professor 

 Perry's proposal cannot be regarded as otherwise than modest and sensible. But 

 what is of real importance is the implied suggestion that the subject should be 

 seriously inquired into at national expense. It must, and at no distant date, be 

 admitted that our fuel stores are national assets over which there should be some 

 national control. 



I may take Food as another subject of which we fail to discern the importance, 

 and which is outside the schoolmaster's ken, although teachers have stomachs as 

 well as other men and boys in particular are believed to take some interest in the 

 existence of that organ. It is but a variant on that of energy, as the food we take 

 is mainly of value as the source of the energy we expend — as fuel, comparatively 

 little being required for the construction and repair of the bodily machinery. 



. . . God has made 

 This world a strife of atoms and of spheres ; 

 With every breath I sigh myself away 

 And take my tribute from the wandering wind 

 To fan the flame of life's consuming fire. 



Olirer Wendell Holmes. 



How many will appreciate this pregnant passage ? In how many schools is: 

 instruction given which would make it possible to recognise its beauty and 

 completeness as a statement of the philosophy of the respiratory process ? Our 

 ignorance of ourselves and of the functions of food is indeed phenomenal. Life 

 involves the unceasing occurrence of a series of changes for the most part chemical. 

 If the proper study of man be man — as the highest dignitary of our Church some 

 time ago asserted it was — the ordinary person would be prone to assume that those 

 in charge of education would so direct studies as to give man some interest in his 

 own wonderful mechanism ; instead they almost uniformly direct that true 

 ' culture ' consists in knowing what he has thought and written of himself in 

 classic tongues in ages gone by before the slightest vestige of understanding of 

 the phenomena of life had been obtained. And we moderns calmly suffer this, 

 and at the same time wonder at the way in which primitive peoples allow their 

 medicine men and wizards to dominate them. "Taking into account what is 

 known, ours perhaps is relatively a deeper savagery than is that of most untutored 

 races : our educational priesthood are for the most part never trained to a know- 

 ledge of the mysteries and deny admission through ignorance rather than 

 wilfully. 



From food to the preparation of food is an easy step — in point of fact the 

 knowledge how to prepare food properly is of far more importance than any know- 

 ledge of what food is and does, as on it depends much of the happiness and health 

 of mankind. Cooking is a branch of applied chemistry. We live in a scientific 

 age — an age of knowingness. We might therefore expect that our girls at least 

 would be so trained at school that with little effort they could become knowing 

 cooks. I am not aware that the authorities who lay down the regulations for 

 University Locals or similar examinations have allowed any such vulgar con- 

 siderations to guide them in drafting their examination schemes : niceties of gram- 

 matical construction, recondite problems in Geography and Histor)', the views of 

 an ancient philosopher who gave himself up to angle worship, are alone thought 

 of on such occasions ; and yet there are times, it is said, when these august persons 

 deign to take some notice of culinary efforts: they cannot be unaware that 

 cookery is a subject of some importance, which might well at least be led up to 

 at school. To justify my reference to the subject, let me read a pa.ssage from 'An 

 Address on Education,' delivered, not by a narrow-minded Goth who is so lost to 

 reason as to doubt the sufficiency of an exclusively literary training as a prepara- 

 tion for life, but by a classic, the Headmaster of a great public school, Thring of 

 Uppingham, in speaking of the Higlier Education of Women at St. Albans in 

 1886, 



