1885.] 



President's Address. 



297 



As I ventured to remark some years ago, we want a most favoured 

 nation clause inserted in our treaty with educators. We have a 

 right to claim that science shall be put upon the same footing as 

 any other great subject of instruction, that it shall have an equal 

 share in the schools, an equal share in the recognised qualification 

 for degrees,, and in University honours and rewards. It must be 

 recognised that science, as intellectual discipline, is at least as 

 valuable, and, as knowledge, is at least as important, as literature, 

 and that the scientific student must no longer be handicapped by a 

 linguistic (I will not call it literary) burden, the equivalent of which 

 is not imposed upon his classical compeer. 



Let me repeat that I say this, not as a depreciator of literature, but 

 in the interests of literature.- .The reason why our young people are 

 so often scandalously and lamentably deficient in literary knowledge, 

 and still more in the feeling and the desire for literary excellence, 

 lies in the fact that they have been withheld from a true literary 

 training by the pretence of it, which too often passes under the name 

 of classical instruction. Nothing .is of more importance to the man 

 of science than that he should appreciate the value of style, and the 

 literary work of the school would be of infinite value to him if it taught 

 him this one thing. But I do not believe that this is to be done by 

 what is called forming oneself on classical models, or that the advice 

 to give one's days and nights to the study of any great writer, is of 

 much value. " Le style est 1'homme meme," as a man of science who 

 was a master of style has profoundly said ; and aping somebody else 

 does not help one to express oneself. A good style is the vivid 

 expression of clear thinking, and it can be attained only by those who 

 will take infinite pains, in the first place, to purge their own minds of 

 ignorance and half knowledge, and, in the second, to clothe their 

 thoughts in the words which will most fitly convey them to the minds 

 of others. I can conceive no greater help to our scientific siudents 

 than that they should bring to their work the habit of mind which is 

 implied in the power to write their own language in a good style. 

 But this is exactly what our present so-called literary education so 

 often fails to confer, even on those who have enjoyed its fullest 

 advantages ; while the ordinary schoolboy has rarely been even made 

 aware that its attainment is a thing to be desired. 



I venture to lay these last observations before you, because we have 

 heard a good deal lately of schemes for the remodelling of the Univer- 

 sity of London, which has done so much, through its Faculties of 

 Science and Medicine, to promote scientific instruction. As a member 

 of the Senate of the University I am necessarily greatly interested 

 in such projects, and I greatly regret that I have been unable to 

 take part in the recent action concerning them. This is not the 

 time or the place for the discussion of any of these proposals, but many 



