DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATION. 
By Dr. Bonney. 
At the opening of Lecture Theatre . 
I am indeed glad to come here to-day and inaugurate this 
important addition to the buildings of the Yorkshire Philosophical 
Society, of which I am proud to be an honorary member, and my 
pleasure is the greater because it is the gift of my old friend, Dr. 
Tempest Anderson, who has thus expressed in a permanent form 
his patriotic regard for the city of his birth and his zeal for science, 
to which, by his researches and photographic studies among the 
volcanoes of the world, he has made such important contributions. 
This handsome lecture theatre, with the spacious rooms beneath, 
so conveniently arranged for work and museum purposes, is one 
more sign of how greatly the national feeling in regard to education 
has changed during my lifetime. When I was a boy, the studies 
of the best schools and the Universities were almost restricted 
to classics and mathematics, excellent instruments, no doubt, for 
mental development, but limited in their scope. In the lower 
secondary and primary schools, as we should now call them, the 
teaching was narrow, unsystematic, more or less dependent on 
the individual master, and thus was commonly bad. What was 
even worse, many, perhaps most, people not only took no interest 
in education, but seemed to regard it as a necessary nuisance. 
Now it may be sometimes in danger of suffering from the multi¬ 
tude of friends, who are more zealous than wise, but at any rate 
there is one great gain that we are beginning to realize, as a people, 
that we can find in Nature’s books not only an indispensable 
instrument for training the mental faculties, but also, even in our 
own land, inexhaustible sources of interest. The study of math¬ 
ematics or logic teaches us to reason correctly, that of languages 
brings us into communion with the thoughts of our fellow-men in 
the present and in the past, but that of the natural sciences trains 
