388 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



impregnated them with, the idea that respect for his companion 

 was for the man one of the prime conditions of moral life. This 

 moral life is her own work. She created and she maintains it. In 

 the cult of which she is the object, in the homage which man ren- 

 ders to her, there is more than the mysterious attraction which 

 sex inspires : there is the instinctive recognition of a great and 

 salutary influence nobly exercised. — Selected and translated for 

 The Popular Science Monthly from the author's article in the 

 Revue des Deux Mondes. 



TEACHING PHYSICS. 



By Prof. FEEDEEICK GUTHEIE, F.K.S. 



THERE is no physical science without exactness, and there is 

 no exactness without measurement. Far as we are still from 

 understanding the mystery of life, it is not to be denied that the 

 greatest advances in biology have been due to exactness in ob- 

 servation and quantitative comparison. This is more markedly 

 the case with the sciences of geology and astronomy. Still more 

 is this to be insisted on in the study of the forces of inanimate 

 Nature. I have always, for instance, tried to persuade those of 

 my friends who are engaged in teaching chemistry that they 

 would do well to begin at once with quantitative methods and 

 determinations in the laboratory, synthetic as well as analytic. 



This quantitative element is still more essential in physics. 

 There everything should be quantitative and exact. But there 

 are different degrees of exactness. No one would expect from the 

 average student of chemistry that all his analyses should be of 

 the same degree of refinement as though he were determining the 

 atomic weight of an element. Let his analyses be sufficiently 

 exact to convince him of the faithfulness of Nature and the trust- 

 worthiness of the statements of the science. 



Now, in bringing before you to-night a short account of the 

 system of teaching practical or laboratory physics which has been 

 adopted at the Government Science Schools with which I am con- 

 nected, I must speak a few words as to the origin of that system. 



The problem was briefly this. Given a class of students of 

 various ages, from sixteen to sixty, and of various degrees of gen- 

 eral knowledge and ability. Assume that they are all anxious to 

 learn, and that none of them have worked systematically before 

 in a physical laboratory, and let the instruction be limited to a 

 few months — say four. 



The problem is to give them a sound but necessarily element- 

 ary training in the science, so that all shall have an opportunity of 

 acquiring such a knowledge of physics as no educated man should 



