D.— ZOOLOGY. 105 



training in a few, my special task now is to urge the necessity of including 

 in the training of every citizen before the completion of his school period 

 .at least a grounding in the main principles of biological science. 



It is necessary in approaching any such question to keep clear in our 

 minds the two main functions of education : (1) the educative function 

 in the strict sense— the training and development up to the highest 

 attainable level of the brain-power which Nature has provided, and (2) the 

 informative function— the providing the mind with an equipment of 

 information which will be of use to it later on. 



Science and the Curriculum. 



It is again necessary to glance for a moment at the general question 

 oi science in relation to education. I, of course, believe that the almost 

 ■complete exclusion of science from the elementary education of the young 

 which has persisted over a prolonged period has been a real tragedy. 

 In the life of the ordinary active citizen, as opposed to that of the mere 

 scholar and recluse, some of the most important factors are those which 

 training in science is specially adapted to develop. Such, above all, are the 

 powers of accurate and rapid observation, and of the accurate and rapid 

 drawing of conclusions from observation. 



But I do not support the claim of Biology to an important place m 

 the basic stage of school education, which should have to do with the early 

 development of these powers. On the contrary, I harbour no doubt m 

 my mind that the department of science to be used for this purpose is not 

 Biology but Physical Science. For the early training of the powers of 

 observation there are two essentials : (1) that the phenomena observed 

 should be capable of numerical expression to a high degree of accuracy, 

 or, in other words, that they should be measurable; and (2) that a given 

 observation should be capable of repetition over and over again under 

 approximately the same set of conditions. Biological observation fails as 

 regards both "of these essentials. When we proceed to apply the method 

 of measurement to something that is alive or that has once been alive, 

 or to some form of vital activity, we find ourselves confronted not with a 

 phenomenon of comparative simplicity, but with a complex of extreme 

 and, in great part, unknown intricacy. If we measure the length of 

 marks upon a piece of paper, or of similar rods of a particular metal, we 

 obtain by so doing data of a totally different order of scientific reliability 

 from those that we obtain by measuring the length of some particular 

 animal, where the particular dimension is the visible residuum left at the 

 end of an immense chain of events during the racial and the individual 

 history of the animal. While such measurements may provide important 

 material for the skilled biometrician, they are, as I believe, totally 

 unsuited for use in elementary education. And a somewhat similar con- 

 sideration affects the repetition of observations upon living things or upon 

 things that have lived— the observable phenomena result from the 

 interaction of so many imperfectly known factors, and are so liable to 

 the influence of disturbing forces, that it is difficult or impossible to repeat 

 observations with any assurance that all the conditioning factors are really 

 the same. 



It is rather in the later stage of education— the informative stage- 

 when the individual has already had his powers of observation and 



