SCIENTIFIC TEACHING. 
251 
strikes a fixed target. How far will the shot penetrate the 
target exerting upon it an average pressure equal to the weight 
of 12,000 tons ?’ 
If it be borne in mind that judgment on the five momentous 
mathematical generalizations (for they are hardly within the 
pale of Physics proper) was demanded of hoys averaging sixteen 
or seventeen years of age, fresh from school, it will be evident 
that the race of schoolmen and of De Morgan’s ‘ Conundrum ’- 
makers is not yet extinct, and that the current rumour of the 
award having been returned to the examiners for mitigation 
may have some foundation in truth. 
It is interesting to note how this radical change in the 
scope and subjects of education has reacted on our older and on 
the more recently founded Universities. Far in the van stands 
that of Cambridge. Here, from the traditional character of the 
instruction given, little modification was required to bring 
modern requirements into harmony with the older teaching. 
Ever since the appointment of the great author of the Principia , 
the discoverer of the Binomial Theorem, and of the ‘ Fluxionary 
Calculus’ to a Junior Fellowship in Trinity College, a.d. 1667, 
Physics and Mathematics have had their full and abundant 
share in the curriculum of this University. If, therefore, there 
has been a greater leaning towards Physics and Applied, as 
distinguished from Pure Mathematics, it has been accomplished, 
almost unperceived, under the guidance of men like Stokes, 
Thomson, Clerk Maxwell, and his successor, Lord Payleigh ; 
who combine the highest powers of numerical analysis with the 
imaginative, constructive, and inventive faculty of Wheatstone 
and Faraday. 
At the sister University of Oxford the case is very different. 
Here the method of the schoolmen and the misrepresented 
teaching of Aristotle reigned supreme until our own time. The 
anachronism was indeed expressed in concrete form by a single 
word. The ‘ Science,’ which up to 1852 formed one foot of the 
tripod, with Scholarship and History, on which Honours were 
adjudged, was the Science of a thousand years before, the Meta- 
physics and Moral Philosophy of the Stoics, — of those who, 
proposing to teach it, wrote over the entrance to their school, 
ov$£ig ayso/uLZTpfiTOQ zlctito, which, in the terms we are now 
using may fairly he translated, ‘Let none unacquainted with 
Physics enter.’ It was a purely mental analysis of the great 
problems even then seen to underlie our simplest conceptions of 
the universe. The change required in this centre of learning 
was therefore from Metaphysics to Physics ; it was a scientific 
putting of the cart before the horse ; a substitution of Pytha- 
goras or Archimedes for Plato or Aristotle, as the latter then 
