248 
SCIENTIFIC TEACHING. 
By W. H. STONE, M.B., F.R.C.P., 
Formerly Scholar of Balliol College, Oxon; Lecturer on 
Physics at St. Thomas’s Hospital. 
I T is doubtful whether the generality of well-educated men 
fully appreciate the great, the radical, and the almost 
revolutionary change which has in the past thirty or forty 
years come over the scope and spirit of English liberal education. 
Indeed it can hardly be termed a change ; but might be more 
correctly designated as a substitution of one branch of human 
knowledge for another. For whereas in the first forty years of 
the present century, the dead languages, especially Latin and 
Greek, History, Logic, and Metaphysics, fairly held their own 
against the computative sciences of Mathematics, Mechanics, Phy- j 
sics, and Chemistry, and the systematic or classificatory subjects 
of Botany, Geology, and Zoology as topics of teaching and exami- 
nation ; they seem at the end of the second forty to have been 
all but superseded. No doubt in the main the revolution, great 
as it undoubtedly is, has proved salutary. Englishmen, with their J 
characteristic tenacity of existing forms, had retained all but j 
unchanged in their large public schools and in the older uni- 
versities a form of intellectual culture which really originated ! 
in the Middle Ages, or at the latest with the restoration of 
learning. This is no mere figure of speech. The writer of the 
present remarks took his first childish lessons, after mastering 
the rudimentary arts of reading and writing, from The Boke of 
Roger Ascliam , and received his first rewards for saying, parrot- j 
like by rote, the ancient farragos now only known by their j 
initial words, — ‘ Propria quae maribus/ ‘ Quae genus/ and ‘ As 
in praesenti/ Of the present generation, not one in a thousand j 
has ever even heard of these mediaeval aide-memoires, or of the 
somewhat more useful Scholastic Scheme of Syllogisms, be- 
ginning with the cabalistic formula, ‘ Barbara Celarent/ Later 
on, he and his companions were expected weekly to manufacture, 
