done. Whether
this is so at schools I cannot tell, but at the universities whole
mornings and afternoons spent in making elaborate preparations,
drawings and series of sections, are frequently wasted. These courses
were devised with the highest motives. Students were to "find out
everything for themselves." Generally they are doing nothing of the
kind. It may have been so once, but with text-books perfected and
teaching stereotyped, the more industrious are slavishly verifying
what has been verified repeatedly, or at best acquiring manipulative
skill. The rest are doing nothing whatever. They would be better
employed taking a walk, devilling for some investigator, browsing in
museums or libraries, or even arguing with each other. Certainly a few
lessons in the use of indexes and books of reference would be far more
valuable. Students of every grade must of course do some laboratory
work, and all should see as much material as possible. My protest is
solely against those long, torpid hours compulsorily given to labour
which will lead to nothing of novelty, and serves only to teach what
can be got readily in other ways. There are a few whose souls crave
such employment. By all means let them follow it.

But whatever is good for maturer students, biology for schoolboys
should be of a less academic cast.

The natural history of animals and plants has the obvious merit that
it prolongs the inborn curiosity of youth, that its subject-matter is
universally at hand, accessible in holidays and in the absence of
teachers or laboratories, and best of all that through biological
study the significance of science appears immediately, disclosing the
true story of man's relation to the world. From natural history the
transition to the other sciences, especially to chemistry and physics,
is easy and again natural. In the study of life many of the
fundamental conceptions of those sciences are met with on the
threshold, and boys whose aptitudes are rather of the physical order
will at once feel the impulse to follow nature from that aspect.
Biology is the more inclusive study. A man may be a good chemist and
miss the broad meaning of science altogether, being sometimes indeed
more devoid of such comprehension than many a philosopher fresh from
Classical Greats.

In appealing for a progress from the general to the particular I am
not blind to the dangers. Biology for the young readily degenerates
into a mawkish "nature-study," or all-