TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION L. 8G5 



Section L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 



President of the Section.— Sir William de W. Abney, K.C.B., 



D.C.L., D.Sc, F.R.S. 



IHUnSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



The Section over which I have the honour to preside deals with every branch 

 of education. It is manifest that in an Address your President cannot deal with 

 all of them, and it remained for me to choose one on which I might remark with 

 advantage. As my official work during the last thirty-three years has been con- 

 nected with education in science, I think I cannot do better than take as my 

 subject the action that the State has taken in encouraging this form of educa- 

 tion, and show that through such action there has been a development of 

 scientific instruction amongst the artisan population and in secondary day schools. 

 The development may not indeed have been to the extent hoped for, but it yet 

 remains that solid progress has been made. 



I have chosen the subject deliberately, as I find that there are very few of 

 those who have the interests of education strongly at heart, or who freely criticise 

 those who have borne the burden of the past, that have any knowledge of the 

 trials and difficulties (some of its own creating, but others forced on it by public 

 opinion) which the State, as represented by the now defunct Science and Art 

 Department, had to contend with in its unceasing missionary effi)rts in the cause 

 of scientific instruction. I shall not attempt to do more than show that whatever 

 its defect may have been in tact, whatever its shortcomings in method, that 

 Department still deserved well of the country for the work that it did in regard 

 to the fostering of scientific instruction in the country at large. 



As far back as 1852 the Government of the day, influenced very largely by 

 the Prince Consort, realised that it had an educational duty to perform to the 

 industrial classes. Whether it was influenced by philanthropic motives or from 

 the evidence before it that if Great Britain was to maintain its commercial and 

 industrial supremacy scientific instruction was a necessity, it matters little. The 

 fact remains that it determined that the industrial classes should have an oppor- 

 tunity of acquiring that particular kind of knowledge which would be of service 

 to them as craftsmen. In this year 1852 the Speech from the Throne contained 

 these words : ' The advancement of Fine Arts and of Practical Science will be 

 readily recognised by you as worthy of a great and enlightened nation. I have 

 directed that a comprehensive scheme shall be laid before you, having in view the 

 promotion of those objects, towards which I invite your aid and co-operation.' 



It is somewhat remarkable that the then Ministry, of which Lord Derby was 

 the chief and Mr, Disraeli the Chancellor of the Exchequer, did not survive to 

 promulgate the scheme, which proposed theoretical rather than practical science, 

 but that their successors, under Lord Aberdeen, issued it and commenced to 

 carry it into eflect. In 1853 the Department of Science and Art was esta- 

 blished under the direction of Mr. Cole. Since 1835 so-called Schools of 

 Design had been in being. These came under the new Department, and it was 

 1903. 3 K 



