12 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
for some of the strongest opposition came from those whose lives had 
been devoted to the cause of education as understood in the old order of 
things. Not until applied science had demonstrated the necessity for 
better training did pure science receive even a moiety of the recognition 
now accorded it in institutions of learning. The new order of things 
has meant a revolution in educational methods, and we now find techno- 
logical schools scattered all over the country, devoted especially to the 
study of applied science, but encouraging research work in pure science 
as well. Even the most conservative of the older institutions, wedded 
through tradition to the classical form of education, have been forced 
to adopt the newer methods. Instruction in applied science has been 
extended downward into the secondary, and even into the primary 
schools, and the advocates of this extension are to be found in so many 
quarters that one almost wonders if the world has gone mad on the sub- 
ject of training eyes and hands. In its place, manual training is a good 
thing, but it seems to me that to do this before requiring some knowledge 
of the. elementary principles that underlie the work is not without dan- 
ger to the resultant product of such a system. All technical and tech- 
nological training — even manual training — should be used to impress 
.principles, and should follow, or at least should not precede, the neces- 
cary theoretical training. We have inanimate machines in abundance 
without endeavoring to transform the youth of the land likewise into 
machines. As a workman, the man who makes use of his highest gift — 
the ability to reason clearly — is worth much more than one who is 
mechanically skilled only. Germany has done more, perhaps, for tech- 
nical education than any other nation, especially in mono-technical 
schools, and the effect of this has been felt in an economic way. During 
the last twenty-six or twenty-seven years her manufacturing industries 
have increased more than temfold, and her shipping more than twenty- 
fold. Her experience and that of other nations show clearly that com- 
mercial prosperity in the future will be largely influenced by the form 
and character of national education. 
What possibilities the future may hold for both pure and applied 
science may not be even guessed at, but the past century- has shown 
enough to cause one to be lost in wonder. The last ten years have been 
the most fruitful of all in applications of science to the wants and pur- 
poses of man, yet at Rochester, in 1892, Professor John B. Johnson 
summed up the results of applied science to that date in the following 
striking language: 
“When we see what miracles have been accomplished in a single cen- 
tury of scientific applications, nearly all by a system of blind experiment- 
ing and repeated failures or only partial successes ; liow we have imitated 
the great motor of the solar system and revivified the world through the 
agency of heat; how we have obliterated time and space on this little 
