August 8, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



173 



afford for the student a kind of moving 

 picture of the progress and the conquests of 

 science. With the vast extension of the 

 field of knowledge during the last three 

 hundred years it has become impossible for 

 any one to grasp the enormous quantity of 

 facts at our disposal. And yet the child, 

 instead of beginning where his father left 

 off, must begin exactly where his father 

 did. Hence the urgent need of careful 

 choice of facts, choice of experiments, of 

 apparatus and of educational machinery 

 if he is to go in one short life even a little 

 further than his father went. In short, 

 the modern college laboratory is not so 

 much a workshop as a school room, in which 

 selected natural phenomena, facts and 

 processes may be conveniently, rapidly and 

 successively demonstrated and enforced. 

 It should provide at the outset an epitom- 

 ized, easy and rapid recapitulation of the 

 slow and laborious discoveries of the past, 

 and thus somewhat resemble the mu- 

 seum of art or natural history which like- 

 wise affords examples or models of past 

 achievement. That it is essentially dynam- 

 ical while the museum is statical alters 

 nothing of its recapitulative educational 

 function ; that it must necessarily compress 

 the long history of the past into a short 

 time, so that it shall give only an epitome 

 of human progress, is inevitable, and if 

 well done is not merely unobjectionable but 

 desirable. 



We hear much nowadays of economy and 

 efBcieney in education, as elsewhere, but 

 we have yet to learn that true efficiency in 

 education is not to be measured so much 

 by the number of hours devoted by the 

 teacher to his pupils or to his laboratory 

 or by the time spent by scholars upon their 

 tasks as by the wisdom of his decisions 

 what to teach, and in what order, and espe- 

 cially what to omit. It is easy, though 

 never wise, to seek to cover the whole field, 



but it is not easy to discover which phe- 

 nomena, which experiments, which demon- 

 strations are most worth while, most pro- 

 ductive of genuine learning, of good judg- 

 ment, common sense, real wisdom and 

 power. 



But whatever our endeavor, this must 

 always be — consciously or unconsciously — 

 an attempt to lead the student on to a 

 sound and true interpretation of nature. 

 And surely the modern interpretation, as 

 we seek and find it in laboratories like 

 this one which we dedicate to-day, is ob- 

 jective rather than subjective. It be- 

 gins with the rigorous abnegation of our- 

 selves, and a cahn survey of the world 

 about us, charged with impersonal matter. 

 The lightning plays about us with the same 

 energy as in Homeric days, but it is no 

 longer Zeus who sends it forth. The waves 

 fling themselves upon our rocky shores 

 to-day precisely as of old they beat upon 

 the islands of the Mgea.n, but we do not 

 see in them, as did the Greeks, the fury of 

 Poseidon. We see only an almost irresisti- 

 ble pressure of the atmosphere in motion. 

 For us the winds are not the messengers 

 of J^olus, but only lifeless gases caught up 

 and dragged by the swiftly spinning earth 

 or seeking an equilibrium upset by local 

 expansions or contractions due to heat or 

 cold. 



Is there, we may well inquire, any more 

 important function for modern scientific 

 education than to interpret, in a laboratory 

 like this which is dedicated to-day, to 

 earnest and eager youths such as the state 

 of Maine sends to her colleges, that nature 

 of which man himself is at once the 

 crowning glory and the principal problem ! 

 To inform, to instruct, to adjust — if pos- 

 sible even to attune — ^the thought, the opin- 

 ion of youth; to correlate its activities to 

 its environment so that its internal rela- 

 tions may become usefully, efficiently and 



