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SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND. 
Do not let it be imagined tliat I am in any way under¬ 
valuing the work which Huxley has done in this matter. 
Besides his inestimable labours in demonstrating to the public 
the perfect compatibility of “ Science and Culture,” labours 
with which the opening day of this Mason College will ever 
be associated, he has performed three great and peculiar 
services. He has taught us the unity of life in a way in which 
it had never been brought home to us before; he has shown 
us that for teaching, whether botanical or zoological, to be 
worthy of the name it must be carried out upon a philosophical 
basis; he has shaken up the dry bones of morphological 
Zoology and Botany and given a vividness and reality to 
teaching which it can never again lose. All teaching, 
whether of Botany or of Zoology, is now placed upon a 
biological basis more completely, perhaps, than Huxley 
himself had anticipated, and in England, at least, this is 
mainly due to his persistent efforts. If I rejoice in the part 
return to the status quo which I have already indicated, it is not 
from any want of the fullest sympathy with the pith and essence 
of Huxley’s method, but rather from the profound belief that 
no effective living instruction can be imparted in even the 
elementary parts of a biological subject, excepting by one who 
has probed the subject to its inner depths, and that in these 
days the amplification of knowledge is so rapid that the men 
are few and far between to whom this is possible in more than 
one direction ; in addition to which I cannot help thinking 
that the apparently inevitable annexation of chairs of Biology 
by those whose special bent is zoological, an annexation 
which is apparent in Wales, in Scotland, in Australia, and 
New Zealand, just as we have already seen it to be in 
England, would have been fatally destructive in its effects 
upon the higher study of my own subject. 
There is work enough for the botanical teacher to do. 
As a science subject for schools, I believe botany to be 
unrivalled; but it will be incompletely taught if ideas are not 
implanted in the minds of the children as to the nature and 
purpose of what they observe, and as to the evident way in 
which nature and purpose inter-act; and the teachers them¬ 
selves can only be trained in the lecture room and laboratory 
of a teaching university, or of some institution akin to Mason 
College, where a specialist is in charge of the subject. The 
scientific pursuit of agriculture, a thing well-nigh unknown 
a few years ago, and not too well known to-day, will depend 
in some degree at least upon a skilled botanical training, 
whether for the agricultural students themselves, or for those 
who are to teach them. For all who, in whatsoever walk in 
