SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND. 
85 
and the keenest sword, are gone for ever; one modern 
invention will work more destruction than a hundred knights, 
with their men at arms, and that, too, at distances which 
might o’erleap half-a-dozen mediaeval battle fields. Surely the 
race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, unless it 
be to the strong in brain, the swift in thought. It would 
almost appear as if the modern equivalent for mens sana in 
corpore sano, is that the primary object of a sound body is to 
keep and support a sound mind. 
Five hundred years ago the visible contests of our race, as 
well as the invisible ones, were fought and won by the keen 
eye, strong arm, skilled hand, and ready foot of our fathers. 
The result of such a contest depended in the main upon these 
factors, and, like the wise men that our forefathers in their 
day and generation were, the education of the male member 
of society was confined almost entirely to the strengthening 
of the body, the training of the eye, the hand, and foot. But 
the inventor of gunpowder undid all that—by slow degrees it’s 
true, but none the less surely. What was the strongest man 
against a missile which would penetrate a breastplate at 
hundreds of yards ? And so the system of warfare ceased 
gradually to be one of keeping troops in compact masses, and 
of trusting to the shock and weight of heavily limbed and 
armoured men. And with the spread of weapons of precision 
and range, even the historic “thin red line” is almost a thing 
of the past, and the actual contact of bodies of armed men is 
being slowly replaced by the artillery duel at long range, and 
battles are decided, like games of chess, by superior skill in 
manoeuvring,—true, not bloodlessly; would that they were ! 
And this is but an emblem of those invisible, but none the 
less real, contests which form the vast proportion of our 
struggle for existence. While it is not possible to say that 
there are no occupations in which bone and muscle are of less 
value than an active brain, it is none the less true that their 
number is diminishing, and that there are few indeed in which 
machinery, the produce of the brain, has not begun to play its 
part. Thus, then, man contends with man in his own trade, 
trade conflicts with trade, nation with nation. The reward of 
victory is money, the right and means to live ; the result of 
defeat is starvation, more or less complete. There is war— 
civil as well as international—constantly raging, none the 
less cruel, none the less pitiless, because it is a bloodless war, 
and is fought with brains instead of arms. 
Now, if it was essential in olden time that men’s arms and 
legs, muscles and eyes, should be trained by constant exercise, 
because upon them fell the brunt of the warfare for the right 
to live; so now it is equally essential that men’s—aye, and 
