PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 5 
more than 35,000/. a year in scholarships to undergraduates, and I 
suppose the case is much the same at Oxford. The result of this is 
that preparation for these scholarships dominates the education of the 
great majority of the cleverer boys who come to these universities, and 
indeed in some quarters it seems to be held that the chief duty of a 
schoolmaster, and the best test of his efficiency, is to make his boys 
get scholarships. The preparation for the scholarship too often means 
that about two years before the examination the boy begins to specialise, 
and from the age of sixteen does little else than the subject, be it 
mathematics, classics, or natural science, for which he wishes to get a 
scholarship; then, on entering the university, he spends three or four 
years studying the same subject before he takes his degree, when his 
real life-work ought to begin. How has this training fitted him for this 
work? 1 will take the case in which the system might perhaps be 
expected to show to greatest advantage, when his work is to be original 
research in the subject he has been studying. He has certainly 
acquired a very minute acquaintance with his subject—indeed, the know- 
ledge possessed by some of the students trained under this system is 
quite remarkable, much greater than that of any other students I have 
ever met. But though he has acquired knowledge, the effect of study- 
ing one subject, and one subject only, for so long a time is too often to 
dull his enthusiasm for it, and he begins research with much of his 
early interest and keenness evaporated. Now there is hardly any 
quality more essential to success in research than enthusiasm. Re- 
search is difficult, laborious, often disheartening. The carefully 
designed apparatus refuses to work, it develops defects which may take 
months of patient work to rectify, the results obtained may appear in- 
consistent with each other and with every known law of Nature, sleep- 
less nights and laborious days may seem only to make the confusion 
more confounded, and there is nothing for the student to do but 
to take for his motto ‘ It’s dogged as does it,’ and plod on, comforting 
himself with the assurance that when success does come, the difficulties 
he has overcome will increase the pleasure—one of the most exquisite 
men can enjoy—of getting some conception which will make all that 
was tangled, confused, and contradictory clear and consistent. Unless 
he has enthusiasm to carry him on when the prospect seems almost 
hopeless and the labour and strain incessant, the student may give up his 
task and take to easier, though less important, pursuits. 
I am convinced that no greater evil can be done to a young man than 
to dull his enthusiasm. In a very considerable experience of, students 
of physics beginning research, I have met with more—many more— 
failures from lack of enthusiasm and determination than from any lack 
of knowledge or of what is usually known as cleverness. 
‘This continual harping from an early age on one subject, which is 
so efficient in quenching enthusiasm, is much encouraged by the 
