SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND. 
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the best subject to teach to children ! But if we are to adopt 
our standard of educational merit, Chemistry must take 
a place, as an educational subject, certainly not at the top of 
the experimental sciences. 
One last thought, and I have done with this part of my 
subject. What do we do for the training of the eyes of 
our children ? Next to nothing. It is true, and from the very 
nature of the case, that the eyes are in constant use, but this 
is not what I mean. What the eyes require is systematic 
training, so as to produce the ability to use them with minute 
accuracy and with rapidity, Give a piece of very accurate 
work to the ordinary artizan, and you will find by bitter 
experience that, what with “rule of thumb” and “near 
enough,” those two great curses of our artizan population, 
your chances of an accurate result are small indeed. We 
shall never recover our vanishing position in the industrial 
world until accurate correlation of eye and hand are an 
essential part of our educational system, and for this purpose 
drawing, and one of the biological sciences—sciences purely of 
observation and experiment—and that, preferably, Botany, as 
the one most suited for school teaching, should, if properly 
taught, be found of inestimable value. I ought, however, to 
restrict here my application of the term Botany to that which 
to botanists is known as “ Morphological ” botany; for 
physiological botany, the knowledge of the life-history of 
plants, dependent as it so largely is upon a prior physical and 
chemical training, could find a place only in the latest stages 
of the schoolboy’s career, if at all. I have no sympathy 
whatever with the mere teaching of scientific facts ; with the 
observation of those facts I have abundant sympathy. 
As scientific method is, in all cases, practically like, it may 
facilitate my task if I refer for one moment to this. Four 
stages are to be recognised in this method: (1) Observation, 
whether of natural phenomena, or of results brought about by 
experiment; (2) Classification, or the arrangement, by com¬ 
parative methods, of the results of observation; (8) Deduction, 
that is inferences drawn from observed phenomena and hence 
application to unknown things; and (4) Verification, that is, 
the process whereby the accuracy of our conclusions is tested. 
Now as far as school purposes are concerned, I make bold to 
believe that no branch of science whatever approaches in value 
in all of these respects to the study with the fuller teaching of 
which my life is occupied, or rather to that portion of it which 
we call systematic and morphological botany; and, as the four 
steps in scientific method noted above represent with tolerable 
accuracy also four stages in the evolution of the mental power 
