his direction is widening by degrees. It
begins to be whispered that even in some boys' schools the laboratory is
only used under compulsion or by exceptional students, and the wave
seems likely to go down as rapidly as it rose.

Probably for girls the strongest argument against experimental science
taught in laboratories is that it has so little connexion with after
life. As a discipline the remedy did not go deeply enough into the
realities of life to reach the mental defects of girls; it was
artificial, and they laid it aside as a part of school life when they
went home. Latitude is now given by the Board of Education for "an
approved course in a combination of the following subjects: needlework,
cooking, laundry-work, housekeeping, and household hygiene for girls
over fifteen years of age, to be substituted partially or wholly for
science and for mathematics other than arithmetic." Comparing this with
the regulations of five or six years ago when the only alternative for
girls was a "biological subject" instead of physics, and elementary
hygiene as a substitute for chemistry, it would seem as if the Board of
Education had had reason to be dissatisfied with the "science" teaching
for girls, and was determined to seek a more practical system.

This practical aspect of things is penetrating into every department,
and when it is combined with some study of first principles nothing
better can be desired. For instance, in the teaching of geography, of
botany, etc., there is a growing inclination to follow the line of
reality, the middle course between the book alone and the laboratory
alone, so that these subjects gather living interest from their many
points of contact with human life, and give more play to the powers of
children. As the text-book of geography is more and more superseded by
the use of the atlas alone, and the botanical chart by the children's
own drawings, and by the beautiful illustrations in books prepared
especially for them, the way is opened before them to worlds of beauty
and wonder which they may have for their own possession by the use of
their eyes and ears and thoughts and reasonings.

3. But better than all new apparatus and books of delight is the
informal study of the world around us which has grown up by the side of
organized teaching of natural science. The name of "nature study" is the
least attractive point about it; the reality escapes from all
conventionalities of instruction, and lo