PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS — HARRIS. H 



may still bo tolerated at the old Universities as an interest- 

 ing and significant relic of earlier times; but in all modern 

 Universities, (as in the University of Birmingham from 

 its foundation), Science is the Premier Faculty and takes 

 the first place. The world advances not because of Church 

 History or Homer or Virgil, but because of James Watt 

 and Stephenson and Dalton, and P'araday and Harvey and 

 Jcnner and Darwin and Kelvin and Lister. Better fifty 

 days of Faraday than a cycle of Aristotle. 



This problem of the place of Science in pre-University 

 education had better be settled once for all, because the 

 present unsatisfactory state of matters is compromising 

 our national efficiency. The modern community thinks 

 that it is time to have its sons taught along lines other than 

 those laid down by the Humanists of the end of the loth 

 century. It is rather ridiculous for boys to know some- 

 thing about Romulus and Remus, and a certain Balbus 

 and his heaven-entreating, stained-glass attitudes, and about 

 a few other persons who may or may not have existed before 

 the Birth of Christ, and yet nothing whatever about the 

 past, present or future of the world they live in or their 

 own bodies and their mental and physical health. Ana- 

 chronism of anachronisms, all is anachronism, saith the 

 modern preacher. 



It is Germany that has shown us national efB.ciency through 

 science. But it is quite a mistake to suppose that those 

 Germans who are so well trained in science are not also 

 educated in the classics. Indeed it has recently been sug- 

 gested in the British Parliament that the exhibition of Ger- 

 man national immorality was due to their following Pagan 

 instead of Christian lines of conduct. Personally, I think 

 this is only part of the explanation; no Pagan writer with 

 whom we are acquainted would have sanctioned the descent 

 to those infra-human depths of cruelty which the Germans 



Proc. & Trans. N. S. Inst. Sci., Vol. XIV. 20 Jan. 17. Proc. II. 



