568 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
nothing in the text-book that is not likely to be set in the examination. 
The problem for the writer of a text-book has come now, in fact, to be 
this—to write a book so neatly trimmed and compacted that no coach,. 
on looking through it, can mark a single passage which the candidate 
for a minimum pass can safely omit. Some of these text-books I have 
seen, where the scientific matter has been, like the lady’s waist in the 
nursery song, compressed “so gent and sma’,” that the thickness of 
it barely, if at all, surpasses what is devoted to the publisher’s adver- 
tisements. We shall return, I verily believe, to the Compendium of 
Martianus Capella. The result of all this is that science, in the hands 
of specialists, soars higher and higher into the light of day, while 
educators and the educated are left more and more to wander in 
primeval darkness. 
““When our system sets up such mean ends before the teacher, 
and encourages such unworthy conceptions of education, is it to be 
wondered at that the cry arises that pupils degenerate beneath even 
the contemptible standards of our examinations? These can hardly 
be made low enough to suit the popular taste. It is no merit of the 
system we pursue, but due simply to the better educated among our 
teachers—men, many of them, who work for little reward and less 
praise—that we have not come to a worse pass already. Some even 
of the much-abused crammers have conceptions of a teacher’s duty 
far higher than the system-mongers of the day, whom it is their 
special business to outwit; and it is but fair to allow to such of these 
also as deserve it part of the credit of stemming the torrent of 
degeneration. We place our masters in positions such that their very 
bread depends upon their doing what many of them know and will 
acknowledge to be wrong. Their excuse is, “‘ We do so and so because 
of the examination.” 
“The cure for all this evil is simply to give effect to a higher 
ideal of education in general, and of scientific education in particular. 
Science cannot live among the people, and scientific education cannot 
be more than a wordy rehearsal of dead text-books, unless we have 
living contact with the working minds of living men. It takes the 
hand of God to make a great mind, but contact with a great mind 
will make a little mind greater. The most valuable instruction in any 
art or science is to sit at the feet of a master, and the next best to 
have contact with another who has himself been so instructed. No 
agency that I have ever seen at work can compare for efficiency with 
an intelligent teacher, who has thoroughly made his subject his own. 
It is by providing such, and not by sowing the dragons’ teeth of 
examinations, that we can hope to raise up an intelligent generation 
of scientifically educated men, who shall help our race to keep its 
place in the struggle of nations.” 
Professor H. E. Armstrong as President of the Chemical Section 
of the British Association takes up the same complaint of defective 
science teaching and attacks the question with great vigour. He 
points out the difference between the routine teaching or cramming 
so prevalent in British schools and colleges and compares it very 
unfavourably with the spirit of research and inquiry which pervades 
German schools, and then goes on to say,—“ to create an atmosphere of 
research in our science colleges in order that it may be possible for our 
students to obtain complete training in chemistry, several things are 
tell ae 
la ee —_—— 7. se ee oe ee 
