Science- Teaching in the Schools. 771 
This exclusion of science from the early stages of education, and 
(for the great majority of the population) the consequent utter 
exclusion of science from their educational course is, I believe, the 
worst feature of our present system of general education. The 
introduction of science into the lower schools is the educational 
reform most urgently demanded. 
One important reason for this reform is implied in what has 
been already said. If any knowledge or appreciation of science is 
to be generally diffused in the community, it must be by the intro- 
duction of instruction in science in the lower schools. Of the 
scholars who enter the primary school, only a small part reach the 
grammar school, and a far smaller part reach the high school. 
When we consider that the “people are destroyed for lack of know- 
ledge”—that the preventable mortality due to simple ignorance of 
hygienic laws exceeds the slaughter of the bloodiest campaigns ;— 
when we consider that not only is the duration of life lengthened, 
but its comforts and means of higher development prodigiously 
increased, by scientific knowledge ;—when we consider that each 
man’s knowledge or ignorance may not only affect for weal or woe 
himself and his own family, but may involve results whose ramifi- 
cations in space and time are beyond our ken :—we cannot fail to 
recognize the importance of providing for all our population the 
means of gaining some acquaintance with those branches of know- 
ledge on which the welfare of humanity so largely depends. 
Another reason for this reform, though less obvious, is perhaps 
even more important. A sound system of education must take 
account of the natural order of development of the mental faculties, 
Nor need we be in any doubt as to what that order is. The per- 
ceptive faculties are the earliest to be developed; later come into 
activity the powers of abstract thought; later still does conscious- 
ness become reflective, and reveal the world of mind. The atten- 
tion of a healthy and normally developing child is given almost 
exclusively to the phenomena of the external world. The ques- 
tions which he asks his parents and other adult friends (if he has 
not been snubbed too many times in such questioning) relate almost 
exclusively to objects of sense around him. There are, indeed, 
miraculous children who speculate about the nature of the soul 
almost before they molt the long dresses of babyhood; but such 
a 
