270 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



at the Golden Gate, but this shall be the vineland, the place of rest, that the old 

 Greek sought forever to find. This will be the land of eternal afternoon." 



THE TEXT-BOOK AS AN ELEMENT IN SCIENCE TEACHING. 



PROF, GILBERT B. MORRISON. 



When a child first awakens to consciousness he finds himself surrounded by 

 a world of wonders, a world of varied forms and forces of which he is himself a 

 part. This has been the common experience of every intelligent child since man 

 first inhabited the earth. The extent of the individual man's knowledge and 

 understanding of the multitude of material objects — animate and inanimate — in 

 their manifold relations to one another and to himself, fixes his real standing as a 

 scientist, for science is the knowledge of the facts of nature systematized as to 

 their relation, agreement and difference, cause, etc. The extent of any individ- 

 ual's understanding depends on the age in which he lived, the native ability pos- 

 sessed by him, and the character of the influences surrounding his life. 



The process of systematizing the world's knowledge has been long and labo- 

 rious, each age and generation contributing its mite. The first condition of any 

 material progress from age to age lies in the record — the recorded mental expe- 

 rience — of each age for the use of the next. Without such recorded experience 

 no progress could be made, for then each child would begin where his father 

 began, instead of where his father left off. The ideas of all who try to interpret 

 the appearances of nature, without first availing themselves of ancestral experience 

 as recorded in books, are about as crude and primitive as are the earliest records 

 of the ancients. To properly direct the young in their efforts to understand, in- 

 terpret, and utilize the facts, phenomena and forces of nature is the business of 

 the teacher of science. Now, the chief means in this process is the text-book. 

 I am aware that lately much has been said and written intended to lead to a con- 

 clusion directly opposite regarding text-books and to make them secondary and 

 unimportant factors in science teaching. Because text-books are often misused in 

 the hands of teachers who know not how to use them — teachers who teach by 

 pages and not by subjects, stuffing the memory and neglecting the reason — many 

 have been erroneously led into the belief that text-books are the next thing to 

 useless, and that pupils should "study nature for themselves." This pedagogic 

 re-action that has led well meaning and enthusiastic teachers to the extreme of 

 condemning the principal means of scientific teaching, has resulted from the preva- 

 lent abuse of this means by not connecting it sufficiently with the objects it treats, to 

 make it understood and, therefore, of any value. One of these extremes is about 

 as censurable as the other. One leads to encyclopaedic, stultified cramming, the 

 other to diffusion and dissipation. A text-book in any department of science is 

 supposed to treat its subject in a general way — to state clearly the main principles 

 of the science, preceding each by a sufficient number of examples and facts to 



