Possibilities of Societies. 49 



bacillus which disposes of certain injurious bacilli in the 

 intestines as effectually as the Bulgarian soldiers have dis- 

 posed of the Turks in Thrace and Macedonia. 



One possibility of the future of this Society is, I venture 

 to think, the part it may play in the education of the town. 

 Excellent as has been Scotland's educational work, it is by 

 no means finished and complete, and I look forward to great 

 modifications in accordance with the pressure and require- 

 ments of the times, and in accordance with our better ac- 

 quaintance with g-rowth bodily and mental. I feel sure that 

 there will in all schools be added to our ordinary curriculum 

 — still far too formal and verbal — appeals to the artistic 

 instincts of the children, to their dramatic instincts, their 

 musical instincts, to their constructive instincts, and above all 

 to their inquisitive instincts — those inquisitive instincts which, 

 from the earliest age, make the child so eager to know all 

 about the world in which it lives, to understand how effects 

 are produced and where things come from. It is those in- 

 quisitive instincts that lead to the incessant questionings that 

 are the terror of parents, and that have been sternly re- 

 pressed in schools, and indeed, sometimes stamped out, so 

 that it has been said that children go to school ignorant but 

 curious and come away ignorant and incurious and indiffer- 

 ent. But these inquisitive instincts must in the future be 

 fostered and encouraged and duly directed. Nature study 

 must take a much larger place in education than it has 

 hitherto done, and anyone who has ever seen a nature lesson 

 properly given will realise how it elicits in a way no other 

 lesson does the interest, acuteness, intellectual activity of 

 the children, and how it leads on to the love of the beautiful 

 and to artistic conceptions. 



Well, when this nature study in schools arrives, mem- 

 bers of this Society should be ready to undertake special 

 branches of it, and to supply suitable specimens and material. 

 One of the advantages of such nature study in schools will be 

 that it will enable boys to show, as our ordinary school course 

 does not do, the special aptitudes and tastes which they 

 possess, and will thus secure for science some earnest and 

 competent workers and rescue from the desk and the office 

 bovs who could never be happy there. That distinguished 



