SCIENCE-TEACHING IN SCHOOLS. 385 
by personal observation or experiment, every important stage in 
the work. 
The principle to be kept in view in teaching a language is, I 
suppose, to make the pupil learn gradually the dry details—the 
declensions, conjugations, grammatical rules, &c.—and in the 
mean time to keep steadily in view the main object of the whole 
thing, the acquisition of asound and thorough knowledge of the 
principles of construction of the language, and of the power of 
applying these general notions to any particular case which may 
be brought under his notice. 
Similarly the plan to be followed in teaching natural science 
is to bring before the pupil a judicious selection of facts so 
arranged as to lead up to the great principles upon which the 
natural sciences rest—gravitation, the indestructibility of 
matter, the conservation of energy, evolution, and so forth. And 
it is further of primary importance that the facts selected, or the 
great majority of them, should be such as are actually verifiable 
by the pupil, and not such as he is obliged to accept either on 
his teacher’s word, or even as a result of his teacher’s observa- 
tions or experiments. 
The question as to what facts or group of facts should be 
selected, ought, as Mr. Thomson hints, to be largely left to the 
individual teacher. From the purely educational point of view 
one fact is about as good as another, and the question then 
resolves itself into this: What particular set of facts is best 
suited for elucidating the fundamentals of natural knowledge ? 
And if two or more subjects seem to have equal claims in this 
respect, we must further ask which furnishes the best—that is, 
_ the most thorough and practical—training in scientific method, 
in observation and experiment, in the estimation of evidence and 
the relations of cause and effect. 
I have elsewhere* expressed the opinion—in which I am glad 
to see that Mr. Thomson concurs—that botany is, on the whole, 
the most satisfactory science subject for schools; by botany I 
mean, of course, vegetable morphology and physiology, and by 
no means that ghastly semblance of a science which, under the 
name of descriptive botany, has done so much to discredit the 
-Mmatural sciences in the eyes of educationalists. I am convinced 
that an almost ideal natural science course might be devised by 
taking botany as a basis, and introducing, whenever necessary, 
the fundamental conceptions of physics and chemistry.t Such 
a course, devoting to it even more than the amount of time 
usually given to science subjects, would carry the pupil through 
a very considerable part of school life, beginning, for the child of 
eight or ten, with the most easily observed facts and simplest 
conceptions, and ending, for the boy or girl of sixteen or eigh- 
teen, with the study of microscopic structure, and the considera- 
tion of such problems as the evolution of the higher from the 
* “ Biology as an Academical Study,” Mature, Vol. xxiv, p. 543. 
+ This was Professor Henslow’s method. See the preface to Oliver’s ** Lessons 
in Elementary Biology.” 
