Septembee 21, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



419 



extending the area of higher education. 

 Except for workers in rapidly progressive 

 branches of technical science, a broad edu- 

 cation seems better adapted to the purposes 

 of life than special training over a narrow 

 range ; and it is difficult to see how a reason- 

 ably elastic examination test can be con- 

 sidered as a hardship. But the case is 

 changed when preparaition for a specialized 

 scientific profession, or mastery of the lines 

 of attack in an unsolved problem, is the 

 object. The general education has then 

 been presumably finished ; in expanding 

 departments of knowledge, variety rather 

 than uniformity of training should be the 

 aim, and the genius of a great teacher should 

 be allowed free play without external tram- 

 mels. It would appear that in this country 

 we have recently been liable to unduly mix 

 up two methods. "We have been starting 

 students on the special and lengthy, though 

 very instructive, processes which are known 

 as original research at an age when their 

 time would be more profitably employed in 

 rapidly acquiring a broad basis of knowl- 

 edge. As a result, we have been extending 

 the examination test from the general knowl- 

 edge to which it is admirably suited into 

 the specialized activity which is best left to 

 the stimulus of personal interest. Informal 

 contact with competent advisers, them- 

 selves imbued with the scientific spirit, who 

 can point the way towards direct appreci- 

 ation of the works of the masters of the 

 science, is far more effective than detailed 

 instruction at second hand, as regards grow- 

 ing subjects that have not yet taken on an 

 authoritative form of exposition. Fortu- 

 nately there seems to be now no lack of 

 such teachers to meet the requirements of 

 the technical colleges that are being estab. 

 lished throughout the country. 



The famous treatise which opened the 

 modern era by treating magnetism and 

 electricity on a scientific basis appeared just 

 300 years ago. The author, William Gil- 



bert, M.D., of Colchester, passed from the 

 Grammar School of his native town to St. 

 John's College, Cambridge ; soon after tak- 

 ing his first degree, in 1560, he became a 

 Fellow of the College, and seems to have 

 remained in residence, and taken part in its 

 affairs, for about ten years. All through his 

 subsequent career, both at Colchester and 

 afterwards at London, where he attained 

 the highest position in his profession, he 

 was an exact and diligent explorer, first 

 of chemical and then of magnetic and 

 electric phenomena. In the words of the 

 historian Hallam, writing in 1839, ' in his 

 Latin treatise on the ' Magnet,' he not only 

 collected all the knowledge which others 

 had possessed, but he became at once the 

 father of experimental philosophy in this 

 island ' ; and no demur would be raised if 

 Hallam's restriction to this country were 

 removed. Working nearly a century before 

 the time when the astronomical discoveries 

 of Kewton had originated the idea of attrac- 

 tion at a distance, he established a complete 

 formulation of the interaction of magnets 

 by what we now call the exploration of 

 their fields of force. His analysis of the 

 facts of magnetic infiuence, and incidentally 

 of the points in which it differs from elec- 

 tric influence, is virtually the one which 

 Faraday reintroduced. A cardinal advance 

 was achieved, at a time when the Coperni- 

 can Astronomy had still largely to make its 

 way by assigning the behavior of the com- 

 pass and the dip needle to the fact that the 

 earth itself is a great magnet, by whose 

 field of influence they are controlled. His 

 book passed through many editions on the 

 Continent within forty years ; it won the 

 high praise of . Galileo. Gilbert has been 

 called ' the father of modern electricity ' by 

 Priestley, and ' the Galileo of magnetism ' 

 by Poggendorff. 



When the British Association last met at 

 Bradford in 1873, the modern theory which 

 largely reverts to Gilbert's way of formula- 



