12 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
one hears it said of a scientist, he has the artistic temperament! It 
even goes to the extent that both usually remain poor and shabby, 
and have little so-called practical knowledge ; they aret equally so ab- 
sorbed in their ideas as to have no time to make money. 
There is a very immediate application to be made from the recog- 
nition of the community of the artistic and scientific spirit. This 
depends, as we have seen, upon the love of the beautiful and the 
high development of the imagination without any direct thought of 
application to human use. With both it is work for the work’s sake 
and usually in the face of obstacles. The application is this. In 
the training of a scientist as well as of an artist the mind is not to 
be loaded with so-called facts, but the imagination is to be appealed 
to, and the sense of the beautiful to be enlarged. There come many 
to the schools and universities who are both scientists and artists 
at heart; but they do not get the manna they seek. The general 
modern method of teaching them what we consider most useful 
instead of what is most attractive to them, kills their sense of the 
beautiful, thereby their nascent enthusiasm, and drives them with 
abhorrence to other fields. There is so much beauty that can be 
offered the student, so much that will awaken delight and hold it, 
that it is indeed a pity not to select just such objects. Should we 
not give the beginner some view of the grand generalizations while 
we are putting him through the mill of the rudiments? Must the 
dry rudiments come first? Is one to labor for several years at learn- 
ing minute points of grammar and syntax before he is introduced 
to the riches of Aeschylus? The poor, thirsty student sketches pain- 
fully the structure of a jelly-fish but learns little enough of its 
wonderful life history. Or must one learn the structures of many 
animals and many parts before he is given the key of the idea of 
descent with modification? No, that is surely wrong, the teacher 
should rather translate some of the major harmonies as an incentive 
to the student to learn to read them for himself. When the boy 
expects bread do not give him a stone. The test of the good teacher 
is not any thorough preparation in minutiae, nugacious memorizing, 
but the holding of attention by , appeal to the aesthetic sense. This 
is the proper weapon of the teacher, as wit is of the politician. The 
present dearth of the scientific spirit in America, and I think that 
is the present condition, is largely due to bad teaching or to too 
much teaching. We have more laboratories than there is need for, 
why is it so hard to keep them filled? 
It was pointed out that the childish mind always contains some 
attraction to the mysterious, coupling an idea of the attractive with 
the dimly understood. Sometimes this condition continues into riper 
