OCTOBEE 28, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



573 



young honor man recently confessed to me 

 that she never spoke of her son's rank be- 

 cause she found it was considered ' ' queer. ' ' 

 This is not what young America generates, 

 but what it borrows or reflects from the 

 environment of its elders. 



The faults with our educational design 

 are to be discovered through study of the 

 lives of great men and through one's own 

 hard and stony experience. The best test- 

 books for the nurture of the mind are these 

 very lives, and they are not found in the 

 lists of the pedagogues. Consult your 

 Froebel, if you will, but follow the actual 

 steps to Parnassus of the men whose polit- 

 ical, literary, scientific, or professional 

 career you expect to follow. If you would 

 be a missionary, take the lives of Patterson 

 and Livingstone; if an engineer "'The 

 Lives of Engineers"; if a physician, study 

 Pasteur, which I consider by far the 

 noblest scientific life of the twentieth cen- 

 tury; if you would be a man of science, 

 study the recently published lives and let- 

 ters of Darwin, Spencer, Kelvin and of our 

 prototype Huxley. 



Here you may discover the secret of 

 greatness, which is, first, to be born great, 

 unfortunately a difficult and often impos- 

 sible task ; second, to possess the instinct of 

 self -education. You will find that every one 

 of these masters while more or less influ- 

 enced by their tutors and governors were 

 led far more by a sort of internal, instinc- 

 tive feeling that they must do certain 

 things and learn certain things. They 

 may fight the battle royal with parents, 

 teachers and professors, they may be 

 as rebellious as ducklings amidst broods 

 of chickens and give as much concern 

 to the mother fowls, but without excep- 

 tion from a very early age they do their 

 own thinking and revolt against having it 

 done for them, and they seek their own 

 mode of learning. The boy Kelvin is taken 



to Germany by his father to study the 

 mathematics of Kelland; he slips down 

 into the cellar to the French of Fourier, 

 and at the age of fifteen publishes his first 

 paper to demonstrate that Fourier is right 

 and Kelland is wrong. Pasteur's first re- 

 search in crystallography is so brilliant 

 that his professor urges him to devote him- 

 self to this branch of science, but Pasteur 

 insists upon continuing for five years 

 longer his general studies in chemistry and 

 physics. 



This is the true empirical, or laboratory 

 method of getting at the trouble, if trouble 

 there be in the American modus operandi, 

 but a generation of our great educators have 

 gone into the question as if no experiments 

 had ever been made. In the last thirty 

 years one has seen rise up a series of 

 "healers," trying to locate the supposed 

 weakness in the American student : one 

 finds it in the classic tongues and substi- 

 tutes the modern; one in the required 

 system and substitutes the elective ; one in 

 the lack of contact between teacher and 

 student and brings in preceptors, under 

 whom the patient shows a slight improve- 

 ment. Now the kind of diagnosis which 

 comes from examining such a life as that of 

 Huxley shows that the real trouble lies in 

 the prolongation to mature years of what 

 may be styled the "centripetal S3''stem," 

 namely, that afferent, medieval and orien- 

 tal kind of instruction in which the student 

 is rarely if ever forced to do his own 

 thinking. 



You will perceive by this that I am al- 

 together on your side, an insurgent in edu- 

 cation, altogether against most of my pro- 

 fession, altogether in sympathy with the 

 over-fed student, and altogether against 

 the prevailing system of overfeeding, 

 which stufiEs, crams, pours in, spoon-feeds, 

 and as a sort of death-bed repentance insti- 

 tutes creative work after graduation. 



