ne. It is not necessary to teach any very
large number of persons very much about any particular science or group
of sciences. What is really important is that people should imbibe some
knowledge of scientific methods--of the meaning of science. This can be
done from the study of quite a few fundamental propositions of any one
science under a good teacher--a first essential. Any person thus
educated will, for the remainder of his life, be able at least to
understand what is meant by science and the scientific method of
approaching a problem. He will not, like an educational troglodyte at a
recent Conference, refuse to describe anything as science which is not
capable of mathematical treatment, nor allude compendiously to
physiological study as "the cutting up of frogs." In a word, he will be
an educated man, which can no more be said of one ignorant of science
than it can be of one whose mind has never experienced the softening
influence of letters.

So far, everybody whose opinion counts seems to be agreed; but in any
plea for an extended and improved teaching of science, certain points
ought not to be left out of count. In the first place, science is not
the key to all locks; there are many important things--some of the most
important things in life--with which it has nothing whatever to do. It
will be well to recall Mr. Balfour's words at the opening of the
National Physical Laboratory: "Science depends on measurement, and
things not measurable are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded,
from its attention. But Life and Beauty and Happiness are not
measurable. If there could be a unit of happiness, politics might begin
to be scientific." It follows that there are a number of subjects on
which the scientific man is just as fit, or as unfit, to express an
opinion as any other man. The intense preoccupation which serious
scientific studies demand, may render the man who is engaged therein
even less competent to express an opinion on alien subjects than one
whose attention, less concentrated, has time to range over diverse
fields of study. Readers of Darwin's _Life_ will remember his confession
that he had lost all taste for music, art, and literature; that he
"could not endure to read a line of poetry" and found Shakespeare "so
intolerably dull that it nauseated" him; and finally, that his mind
seemed "to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out
of a large collection of facts."

Despite this war