SECTION L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 
SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITIES: 
SOME PROBLEMS OF THE PRESENT AND FUTURE 
ADDRESS BY 
H., b. LIZARD, C.B., ERS... 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Tuis section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 
rejoices in the impressive title of ‘ Educational Science.’ To judge from 
its past proceedings the range of its interests is so prodigious as to 
daunt one like myself, who neither pretends to be an educational expert 
nor belongs to the large body of enthusiastic amateurs who hold such 
pronounced and varied views on the education of other people’s children. 
The only way in which I can hope to justify my selection this year as 
President of the Section, an honour that I deeply appreciate, is to devote 
most of my address to matters of which I have first-hand knowledge and 
experience. If I occasionally appear to be too didactic, please attribute 
this only to my desire not to be long-winded ; while if, in speaking of 
Universities that I know best, I make remarks that are not applicable to 
Scottish Universities, please forgive the ignorance of a Sassenach. 
We have lived, and are living, in times of absorbing interest. I was 
at a public school at a time when to take an interest in science was held to 
be a sign that you were not quite a gentleman. At my school there were 
‘ close’ scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge, but I was soon given to 
understand that these were not available for boys on the science side. 
They were made so available soon after I left, at about the time when 
baths were first installed in college—an interesting coincidence of sanity and 
sanitation. It does not seem so very long ago to me ; yet the changes that 
have taken place since then are so profound that it is now considered quite 
respectable to be a scientist, even at a public school. I wonder if any 
generation will ever see such far-reaching changes as we have seen in so 
short a space of time! When I reflect that our better conditions of life, 
better health, greater opportunities for interesting and useful work and 
recreation, have been mainly brought about directly or indirectly as the 
result of scientific education and research, I wonder that some distinguished 
men have fallen into a gentle melancholy with advancing years, and tend to 
dwell in public and in private rather on the mistakes than on the achieve- 
ments of this brilliant age. Mistakes there must be when progress is 
rapid. One difference between these and other times within living 
memory is that a few years of madness have revealed weak spots in the 
structure of civilisation that would otherwise have been discovered only 
