Nature as an Educator. 1*77 



practical issue, let us think for a little on the uses of the 

 study of nature, whether we regard these in relation to the 

 forming of the character and promoting the happiness 

 of the student or to business utilities to which knowledge 

 of nature may be applied. At present we hear much of 

 applied and technical science, and these are daily showing 

 their inestimable value, but it must be borne in mind that 

 the science that enables us to smelt an ore, to conKtruct a 

 machine or a bridge is useful only in so far as it promotes 

 the welfare and happiness of humanity. Apart from these 

 it would be wholly unpractical and useless. That teaching 

 of science, on the other hand, which exalts and ennobles 

 the man and developes his higher nature, even if it have 

 no technical applications, is that which is directly practical 

 in the highest sense. 1 do not say that these are neces- 

 sarily two distinct kinds of teaching. They may be and 

 should be combined, and while we seek principally to pro- 

 mote by the study of nature the well-being of the man 

 himself, we must never forget the multiform uses of science 

 in promoting human welfare through technical applications. 

 We may return to this thought, but in the meantime I 

 desire to speak of nature as an educator of the man himself, 

 and especially of those powess which make him dis- 

 tinctively a man and the very image of God. 



The president then referred in detail to the educational 

 uses of nature in training the observing powers and those 

 of comparison and causation, to its bearing on the culture 

 of true and high art, and to the large views to which it 

 leads of the universe as an ordered and regulated cosmos. 

 He then proceeded as follows : — 



I may be pardoned here for directing your attention for 

 a few minutes to the testimony of a writer eminent as an 

 authority in art and full of true feeling for nature, both in 

 reference to its direct ability to the thinking mind and its 

 indirect utility as a means of furthering material interest. 

 Euskin thus discourses on these points : — 



" That is to everything created, something pre-eminently 

 useful, which enables it rightly and fully to perform the 

 functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we 



