252 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



curiosity regardiug natural laws — what we now call the spirit of research, 

 because the word curiosity is more widely occupied. The invention of the 

 mariner's compass, and the exploratory spirit which accompanied it, led 

 to the discovery of the Americas, South Africa, India and the Far East. 

 The invention of gunpowder and that of paper and printing were the 

 technological offspring of classical literature, strange as this may seem to 

 us who see the wide gap between the modern classical school and the 

 technical institute. 



Some of the scientific developments which followed the classical 

 Renaissance had possibly independent origins, but they were mainly the 

 product of intellectual activities quickened by the rediscovery of biiried 

 philosophies. What would otherwise have been but slow combustion 

 developed, because of the classics, with the speed of an explosion. Greek 

 literature acted on mediaeval scholasticism like nitric acid on combustible 

 cellulose : cotton was converted into gun-cotton. 



Thereafter followed the usual life-history of every organism : classical 

 learning went through a phase of vigorous youth, vitalising the world 

 with new energy and new ideas, till it reached the stage of adolescence 

 and, with it, specialisation. With specialisation the study of the classics 

 tended to become narrowed to its linguistic, grammatical, and purely 

 rhetoric aspects : its main object became obscured and stricken with a 

 formalism and even pedantry. 



In the same way there is a danger, if not a noticeable tendency, in 

 our study, and therefore teaching, of science so to produce by specialisa- 

 tion similar cultural ptomaines and thus to obtain what corresponds to 

 the devitalised residue of the humanities without humanism. 



In a thoughtful paper read in this city before the Congress of Empire 

 Universities in 1921, Dr. C. H. Desch advocated the adoption of the 

 historical method in teaching science. Emerson said that ' there is 

 properly no history, only biography ' ; for history consists of innumerable 

 biographies. Nothing appeals to a man like humanity ; if we inspire the 

 student's curiosity regarding the life-histories of our leaders, he wiU find 

 out for himself the facts and principles of their science and technology. 



Everyone here must recollect the time when he passed from the 

 secondary school to the university ; when he saw and met in real life men 

 whose names he had heard before as objects of another world. Recalling 

 the thrills of those days, one can understand why the professor's lecture 

 was more inspiring than the more directly useful demonstration by a 

 junior assistant in the laboratory. The professor, who has grown with 

 his science, more naturally recalls the work of his contemporaries and 

 immediate predecessors ; and, until he reaches the stage of pure reminis- 

 cence, inspires his teaching by biography. 



The educational balance is not secured by requiring students to attend 

 a formal course of classics or history as well as of science. That would be 

 merely to double the offence. Separate courses of history and science form 

 a mechanical mixture as dead as the chemical constituents of protoplasm. 

 It is the biographical history of science itself that contains the essential 

 vitamins of the student's food. An illustration, possibly somewhat 

 exaggerated, that I used here in 1924 will show what is intended : giving 

 two separate doses of two unrelated subjects to act as mutual correctives 



