ith this, as they master the principles of science, let them
learn also the human side of science,--the story of Newton, withholding
his great discovery for years until he could be absolutely certain that
it was a law; until he could get the very commonplace but obstreperous
moon into harmony with his law of falling bodies;--the story of Darwin,
with his twenty-odd years of the most patient and persistent kind of
toil; delving into the most unpromising materials, reading the driest
books, always on the lookout for the facts that would point the way to
the explanation of species;--the story of Morse and his bitter struggle
against poverty, and sickness, and innumerable disappointments up to
the time when, in advancing years, success crowned his efforts.

All this may seem very remote from the prosaic task of teaching pupils
how to study; and yet it will lend its influence toward the attainment
of that end. For, after all, we must lead our pupils to see that some
books, in spite of their formidable difficulties and their apparent
abstractions, are still close to life, and that the truth which lies in
books, and which we wish them to assimilate, has been wrought out of
human experience, and not brought down miraculously from some remote
storehouse of wisdom that is accessible only to the elect. We poke a
good deal of fun at book learning nowadays, and there is a pedantic type
of book learning that certainly deserves all the ridicule that can be
heaped upon it. But it is not wise to carry satire and ridicule too far
in any direction, and especially when it may mean creating in young
minds a distrust of the force that, more than any other single factor,
has operated to raise man above the savage.

V

To teach the child the art of study means, then, that we take every
possible occasion to impress upon his mind the value of study as a means
of solving real and vital problems, and that, with this as an incentive,
we gradually and persistently and systematically lead him to grasp the
method of study as a method,--that is, slowly and gradually to abstract
the method from the particular cases to which he applies it and to
emotionalize it,--to make it an ideal. Only in this way, so far as we
may know, can the art be so generalized as to find ready application in
his later life. To this end, it is essential that the steps be taken
repeatedly,--not begun to-day and never thought of again until next
year,--but daily, even hourly,