TEACHING OF SCIENCE 203 



formed an experiment so easily made in the home 

 of open fires. So he rashly answered, "It does not 

 burn blue, it is impossible, sodium-salts give a 

 yellow flame." On this my friend fetched the salt 

 and threw a handful on to the glowing coals — ^with 

 the result that the eminent chemist rose up and 

 fled in silence from the room. He gave an admir- 

 able example of how not to behave. He ought not 

 in the first place to have denied the fact a priori, 

 and when he was convicted he should have been 

 glad to learn. 



It has been said that in scientific work accuracy 

 is the most valuable quality and the hardest to 

 attain. Accuracy alone may strike us as a dull 

 quality to be so highly rated. When a given result 

 has been obtained in eleven successive experi- 

 ments, and fails on the twelfth occasion, it is the 

 accurate-minded man who makes a wise use of 

 the failure. It ought to arouse in us a flame 

 of curiosity, lighting in us a whole posse of theories, 

 which force us to vary our procedure and finally 

 enable us to solve the difficulty. 



Most of us are inclined to treat an unexpected 

 result in a cavalier spirit, pushing it aside as "only 

 an exception," whereas it should be received as 

 possibly a personage of distinction in disguise, 

 and not as a rude disturber of our pet ideas. 



A class of experimentalists^ exists from whom 

 we all suffer — namely, cooks. How happy we 

 should be if they possessed this lively desire to 

 understand their own lapses from good cookery! 

 It may be urged in excuse, that although the 

 essence of cooking is the application of heat to food, 



