tRAKSACTlONS OF SECTION L.— -rRESlDENTlAL ADDRESS, 917 



Section L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 

 President of the Section. — Professor L. C, Miall, D.Sc, F.R.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



Useful Knowledge. 



I PROPOSE to speak to you about useful knbwledge, and you will, I tliiuk, admit 

 tlie importance and the appropriateness of the subject. But_ you may be 

 surprised that I venture upon so wide a theme. For my part, I maintain that the 

 extent of a subject gives no notion, however vague, of the time required to 

 discuss it. If you have a quarter of an hour and a sheet of paper you may 

 employ them with about equal probability of success in delineating a baud's 

 breadth of greensward, or the British Isles, or the whole world. Bossuet handled 

 universal history from his own point of view in a volume of no more than 

 six hundred octavo pajjes, and Buffon ^ remarks, quite truly, that every subject, no 

 matter how vast, can be treated in a single discourse. You will observe with satis- 

 faction that I deny myself the commonest and most plausible excuse for an unduly 

 prolonged address ; that, I mean, which pleads the magnitude of the siibject. 



I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of useful knowledge. It is not 

 everything, nor yet the highest thing in education. There are things which we 

 rarely mention in a British Association section, and which are perhaps best left 

 undiscussed, except where there is entire sympathy between speaker and^ hearer ; 

 some of these stand above useful knowledge of every kind. But the fact that 

 useful knowledge occupies nearly all the school-time shows its practical import- 

 ance, aad disposes us to welcome any means of making it more effective. 



Book-learning. ^ 



The knowledge of books may be an excellent form of useful knowledge ; it 

 may also, when it strives merely to record and remember, be un])roductive and 

 ttupefying. Let me give you an example, by no means an unfavourable one, of 

 the book-learning which become5 sterile for lack of method and aim. My example 



' B'tscours a V Academic. 



'' In the preparation of this Address I have been much embarrassed by the 

 inexactness of the terms used to denote different studies. Some, such as science, 

 literature, &c., include boih process and product, which is as if we had but one 

 name for weaving and cloth. The accepted names of the divisions of knowledge 

 are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive ; they are not so much logical terms 

 as names of occupations, each of which might well occupy one man's time. We 

 acquiesce in such anomalies because we feel the need of brief and comprehensive 

 expressions, and find that bad definitions are not so intolerable as cumbrous and 

 unfamiliar terms. 



