174 Canadian Record of Science. 



some years ago, when it was decreed in England that 

 Hygiene should be taught in the schools. The subject was 

 a popular one, and would have been taken up with 

 enthusiasm. But unfortunately it had been represented to 

 the Committee of the Privy Council that it was necessary 

 that the pupils should have learned Physiology before 

 entering on Hygiene. Here was a difficulty which the 

 teachers at once felt. Physiology was an unpopular subject. 

 The trained teacher had learned to take his pupils through 

 the anatomy of a few common animals ; but to him a frog 

 or a crayfish was no more than a sum in arithmetic, some- 

 thing to be learned as a matter of dissection and dry 

 anatomy. The subject consequently was repulsive both to 

 pupils and parents, and if tbis ordeal had to be first gone 

 through there was an end of hygiene. Thus by a strange 

 inversion of education and science, one of the most 

 attractive and useful subjects had become a bugbear. It is 

 to be hoped that just as English educators have got over 

 many other follies they have also surmounted this. 



One would fancy, however, that there is still need for 

 reform, from the following terse and pungent summary of 

 the matter in a recent address before the Poyal Micro- 

 scopical Society by its president, Dr. Hudson : — 



" Which, then, is the more scientific treatment of a group 

 of animals — that which classifies, catalogues, measures, 

 weighs, counts and dissects, or that which simply observes 

 and relates ; or, to put it in another way, which is the better 

 thing to do, to treat the animal as a dead specimen or a 

 living one? — 



"Merely to state the question is to answer it. It is the 

 living animal that is so intensely interesting, and the main 

 use of the indexing, classifying, measuring and counting 

 is to enable us to recognize it when alive and to help us to 

 understand its actions." 



He goes on to contrast the position of the mere learn er 

 of structures and hard names with that of the country lad 

 who has studied nature in her own haunts : — 



" He has watched the cunning flycatcher leaving her 

 obvious, and yet invisible young, in a hole in an old wall, 



