CONDITIONS OF HEALTH ESSENTIAL FOR CARRYING ON INSTRUCTION. 349 
case of women students, the nutritive value of foodstuffs in connection 
with their cost in the market, and in relation to the needs of young 
children, should be known in outline, even though the student may not 
be specially qualified in domestic economy. Only thus will they know 
how to conduct the school as a whole with the greatest profit to the 
health and bodily development of the scholars, and how to adapt the 
instruction to the limitations which are imposed in some cases by 
the feeble health of the children or by the poverty or neglect of their 
parents.’ 
In the prefatory memorandum to the Regulations it is stated that ‘ The 
student should, therefore, be so trained as to be capable, subsequently, as 
a teacher, of comparing and contrasting the phenomena of life and 
energy in nature as they offer themselves in the particular neighbourhood 
and conditions in which he and his scholars may find themselves ; and 
this will not be achieved merely by the systematic sequence of any formal 
syllabus of Nature study, which may prove to have been in no way related 
to the conditions of what are ultimately the teacher’s surroundings. His 
own systematic study must be within the field of natural science in its 
strictest sense ; the more he knows of this, the better will be his equip- 
ment, provided he can bring this knowledge to bear upon the phenomena 
which surround man wherever he may be, and which shape or obstruct 
his relations with other animate or inanimate beings, and provided he 
uses his scientific training and knowledge as an aid in encouraging the 
children to observe for themselves facts, and their relations to other facts, 
rather than as a means for instructing them in what they should see or 
look for. 
‘{t is the duty of the training colleges to see that each intending 
teacher shall devote some portion of his period of training to study in 
which the method above described shall be thoroughly, even laboriously, 
carried out. To apply such principles to the whole instruction of a 
training college is not feasible in existing circumstances, and the extent 
to which it is possible in any particular college must necessarily depend 
on the qualifications of the staff and the resources, in the form of libraries, 
practising schools, laboratories, &c., available for the use of the students. 
But it should be remembered in every case that the student who has built 
up for himself, on the best foundation he can find, a series of conclusions, 
each of which has been submitted to the most searching tests his means 
enable him to apply, will have acquired an insight into the true nature 
of knowledge which no other process of instruction can furnish. Even 
though that part of his mental equipment which is deeply impressed 
with this special character may lie within narrow limits, the student will 
have learnt by trial the value of rigorous inquiry, he will have gained 
the power to revise and correct his own knowledge when time brings 
wider experience and riper judgment, and he will have acquired an outlook 
upon the mental processes concerned in the growth of knowledge in the 
individual mind, which will be of lasting service to him in his professional 
work as a teacher. 
‘Every training college, therefore, should attempt, even if it be only 
in a limited degree, to conduct its instruction, in as many branches of the 
curriculum as possible, in such a way that there shall be in the case of 
each student some range of knowledge within which there is no fact and 
no inference from facts, which has not been subjected to the severest test 
at his command.’ 
