president’s address. 
369 
or the other should be taught in the public schools, or should 
form part of our college curriculum, I often feel, as no doubt 
you often feel, how much is not taught that ought to be taught. 
We cling to old systems of education with tenacity and sincerity. 
The youth of the country are compelled to go through courses of 
study from which they learn really little of the life that is about 
them, of the world in which they live, or, what is of more import- 
ant still, of themselves. A man who became a great philosopher, 
and whose opinions and thoughts have had considerable influence 
upon the modern world, struggled from a Scottish village school 
to a famous university in his native country, but soon left it, as 
he discovered that it had little or nothing to teach him of the 
things which he wanted to know. In the past century, indeed in 
the past half century, real knowledge of the material world has 
accumulated so fast that it has gone far ahead of all our school 
books and of our school teaching, and we have scarcely noted the 
fact in our methods of education. The plants which grow 
around us, the trees which shelter us, or which adorn our parks, 
the insect world so full of strange life and often containing 
dangerous foes, the birds whose attractive forms are so agreeable 
to the eye and whose music is so grateful to the ear, the soil 
which produces for us articles of food, the stones from which 
we construct our houses are things of which we know too little, 
of which we teach the young scarcely anything, or of the mystery 
which lies in and beyond them, unless some enthusiastic student 
of any of these, who may be a school teacher, brings them within 
the reach of the pupil in a furtive and doubtful way. And so to 
most of us when our school days are over, as to Peter Bell in 
Wordsworth’s poem, “ the yellow primrose is but a yellow prim- 
rose, and nothing more.” We are unconscious of the mystery 
of its life, of its far-off origin in the world of matter, of its rela- 
tion to the law of substance, of the fact that it is constructed of 
the same material as that of which we are constructed, and that 
it lives not simply for us, but in obedience to universal law with 
a life such as it is that is all its own. I remember that when 
I was a boy at school, filled with a desire to know something 
about everything, I was told that everything which was on this 
earth was made for man’s use, and that we should be very grate- 
