TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 873 



views I share in this matter are not opposed to or distrust the good effects of those 

 parts of education which date from ancient times. The great men who have come 

 under their sway are living proofs that they can be effective now as they have been 

 in times past, but we look to the production of greater men by the removal of the 

 limitations which tradition sets. I myself gratefully acknowledge what the public 

 school at which I had my early education did for me, but I think my gratitude 

 would be more intense had I been given some small elementary instruction in that 

 natural knowledge which has had to be picked up here and there in after life. 



There is one type of college which I have not alluded to before, and that is 

 the technical institutes. These have been fostered by the localities in which 

 they are situated, and been largely supported by the whisky money, supple- 

 mented by Government aid. I am glad to see that in the last regulations of the 

 Board of Education these colleges will receive grants for higher scientific instruc- 

 tion, and I have no doubt that in the near future such institutions and schools of 

 science will receive a block grant, which will give them even still greater freedom 

 than they now enjoy. These are colleges to which students from secondary schools 

 will gradually find their way, where they wish for higher education of a type 

 different from tbat to be gained at a university. 



I have endeavoured to give a brief historical sketch of what the State has 

 done in helping forward instruction in natural knowledge amongst the industrial 

 classes, adults and children, and how gradually its financial aid has been extended 

 to secondary schools. I have also endeavoured to indicate the steps by which 

 practical instruction has been fostered by it. I have done this because I am 

 confident that ninety-nine educationists out of every hundred have but little 

 idea what the State has been doing for the last fifty years. Some connected with 

 secondary schools — ^I have personal knowledge — were till lately ignorant that 

 the State hS,d offered advantages to them of a financial nature. I may say that 

 the work of the late Science and Art Department was largely a missionary work. 

 It was abused, sometimes rightly but more often wrongly, for this very work, and 

 it had more abusers at one time probably than any other Government Department. 

 Even friends to the movement of modernising education found fault with it as 

 antiquated and slow, but I can assure you that no greater mistake can be made in 

 pressing forward any movement by any hurried change of front or by endeavouring 

 to push forward matters too rapidly. In the first place, the Treasury naturally 

 views untried changes with suspicion, and this fact has to be dealt with more 

 particularly when there is no great expression of public opinion to reckon with. 

 At the same time it cannot be stated too strongly that the Treasury has in recent 

 years dealt in a friendly and enlightened spirit with all matters which could affect 

 the spread of science. Again, there is a hostility to great and rapid changes in the 

 minds of those whom such changes affect. 



The policy must always be to progress as much as is possible without rousing 

 too great an opposition from any quarter, and I think it will be seen that the 

 progress made during the last twenty-five years has, by the various annual incre- 

 ments, been perhaps more than could have been hoped for, and gives a promise 

 for even more rapid advances in the future. 



As an appendix to this Address I have given a brief epitome of the increases in 

 students, in schools, in laboratories, and in grants which have taken place since 

 1861. If to the last be added the amount spent out of the whisky money an 

 additional half million may be reckoned. 



It will be seen that the progress made has been gradual but satisfactory, and 

 that, if we showed some of the results graphically, weighted according to the 

 circumstances of their date, and dared make an extrapolation curve of future 

 results, we should have a complete justification for prophesying hopefully. 



The question of the supply of science teachers has already been referred to. 

 My remarks I should like to supplement by saying that in the greater number of 

 schools teachers are to be found who have been trained at the Royal College of 

 Science, and mostly at public expense — some through scholarships gained by 

 competition and some through training selected teachers. The success of the 

 movement for the introduction of science instruction in schools depended on 



