ions were
constructed the barometer, the siphon, the air-gun, and the air-pump.
All the laws of statics and hydrostatics were discovered by experiments
as simple as these. I would not have my pupil study them in a
laboratory of experimental physics. I dislike all that array of
machines and instruments. The parade of science is fatal to science
itself. All those machines frighten the child; or else their singular
forms divide and distract the attention he ought to give to their
effects.

I would make all our own machines, and not begin by making the
instrument before the experiment has been tried. But after apparently
lighting by chance on the experiment, I should by degrees invent
instruments for verifying it. These instruments should not be so
perfect and exact as our ideas of what they should be and of the
operations resulting from them.

For the first lesson in statics, instead of using balances, I put a
stick across the back of a chair, and when evenly balanced, measure its
two portions. I add weights to each part, sometimes equal, sometimes
unequal. Pushing it to or fro as may be necessary, I finally discover
that equilibrium results from a reciprocal proportion between the
amount of weight and the length of the levers. Thus my little student
of physics can rectify balances without having ever seen them.

When we thus learn by ourselves instead of learning from others, our
ideas are far more definite and clear. Besides, if our reason is not
accustomed to slavish submission to authority, this discovering
relations, linking one idea to another, and inventing apparatus,
renders us much more ingenious. If, instead, we take everything just
as it is given to us, we allow our minds to sink down into
indifference; just as a man who always lets his servants dress him and
wait on him, and his horses carry him about, loses finally not only the
vigor but even the use of his limbs. Boileau boasted that he had
taught Racine to rhyme with difficulty. There are many excellent
labor-saving methods for studying science; but we are in sore need of
one to teach us how to learn them with more effort of our own.

The most manifest value of these slow and laborious researches is, that
amid speculative studies they maintain the activity and suppleness of
the body, by training the hands to labor, and creating habits useful to
any man. So many instruments are invented to aid in our experiments
and to supplement the action