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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 792 



whole to respect and like those things 

 which are good and clean and dignified, a 

 feeling which manifests itself in their 

 strivings after good clothes, good society 

 and things supposedly artistic, not to men- 

 tion innumerable longings after the lofty 

 unattainable. Now a dirty or carelessly- 

 managed laboratory is a direct shock to 

 this feeling, and most scientific laborato- 

 ries sin in these features. I believe there is 

 no part of a college or school equipment 

 which ought tO' be prepared and managed 

 with more care than a scientific laboratory. 

 Efficiency for its purpose is of course the 

 first requisite of any laboratory, but in 

 college or high school that efficiency should 

 be secured with attention to the utmost of 

 pleasing effect, in the direction of a large 

 simplicity, evidence of care for each fea- 

 ture, and an atmosphere of spacious and 

 even artistic deliberation. As an example 

 of what can be done by good taste to give 

 a pleasing setting to the most unpromising 

 objects, I commend the New York Zoolog- 

 ical Park, which embodies an idea much 

 needed in most of our botanical institu- 

 tions. We ought not to permit the accumu- 

 lation of dusty and disused articles around 

 laboratories any more than around libra- 

 ries: our teaching museums should con- 

 tain no crowded accumulations of half- 

 spoiled specimens in leaky green bottles, 

 but only a selection of the most important, 

 and those in the best of receptacles well 

 labeled and tastefully displayed. Our 

 experiments with plants should not ex- 

 hibit dirty pots on untidy tables, but every 

 plant should present an aspect suggestive 

 of considerate care, while all the surround- 

 ing appliances should glitter with clean- 

 ness and stand on a spotless table widely 

 enmargined with space and neatness. One 

 of my friends in a neighboring college has 

 said of the methods of my laboratory that 

 they savor of the old maid. I take pride 



in this compliment, for it shows I am 

 advancing. All of these qualities of care, 

 neatness, concentration upon a few large 

 and worthy things, can be made to appeal 

 greatly to youth, as I have learned from 

 experience. Besides, they are scientific, 

 and they are right. 



There is yet one other phase of this sub- 

 ject of humanism in science teaching 

 which I wish to emphasize. I think we do 

 not make enough use in our teaching of the 

 heroic and dramatic phases of our science, 

 of the biography of our great men and the 

 striking incidents of our scientific history. 

 I know that their use is attended with dan- 

 gers, dangers of false sentimentalism, of 

 substitution of weak imagery for strong 

 fact, of complication with religious preju- 

 dices; and they should therefore be intro- 

 duced only as the teacher grows wiser. 

 But when the tactful teacher can employ 

 them to touch the higher emotions of his 

 students, he should do so. The imagina- 

 tion is as necessary a part of the equipment 

 of the man of science as of the man of let- 

 ters or of art, a matter which has been il- 

 luminated with all his usual skill by Presi- 

 dent Eliot in his great address on the new 

 definition of the cultivated man. When 

 Darwin wrote his famous passage on the 

 loss of his esthetic faculties he was a little 

 unfair to his science and a good deal un- 

 fair to himself. For he never mentioned 

 the compensation he had found in the in- 

 tensity of lofty pleasure derived from his 

 acquisition of new truth. Science hath her 

 exaltations no less than poetry, music, art 

 or religion. Not only is the feeling of ela- 

 tion which comes to the scientific investi- 

 gator with the dawning of new truth just 

 as keen, just as lofty, just as uplifting as 

 that given by any poetry, any music, any 

 art, any religious fervor, but they are, in 

 my opinion, the same in kind. There is but 

 one music heard by the spirit, and that is 



