to overwhelm its votaries; as if the man of science of the future were condemned to diminish into a narrower and narrower specialist, as time goes on.
I am happy to say that I do not think any such catastrophe a necessary consequence of the growth of science; but I do think it is a tendency to be feared, and an evil to be most carefully provided against. The man who works away at one corner of Nature, shutting his eyes to all the rest, diminishes his chances of seeing what is to be seen in that corner; for, as I need hardly remind my present hearers, that which the investigator perceives depends much more on that which lies behind his sense-organs than on the object in front of them.
It appears to me that the only defense against this tendency to the degeneration of scientific workers lies in the organization and extension of scientific education in such a manner as to secure breadth of culture without superficiality; and, on the other hand, depth and precision of knowledge without narrowness.
I think it is quite possible to meet these requirements. There is no reason, in the nature of things, why the student who is destined for a scientific career should not, in the first place, go through a course of instruction such as would insure him a real, that is to say, a practical acquaintance with the elements of each of the great divisions of mathematical and physical science; nor why this instruction in what (if I may borrow a phrase from medicine) I may call the institutes of science should not be followed up by more special instruction, covering the whole field of that particular division in which the student eventually proposes to become a specialist. I say not only that there is no reason why this should not be done, but, on the ground of practical experience, I venture to add that there is no difficulty in doing it. Some thirty years ago my colleagues and I framed a scheme of instruction on the lines just indicated, for the students of the institution, which has grown into what is now known as the Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines. We have found no obstacles in the way of carrying the scheme into practice except such as arise, partly, from the limitations of time forced upon us from without; and, partly, from the extremely defective character of ordinary education. With respect to the first difficulty, we ought, in my judgment, to bestow at least four, or better five, years on the work which has, at present, to be got through in three. And, as regards the second difficulty, we are hampered not only by the ignorance of even the rudiments of physical science, on the part of the students who come to us from ordinary schools, and by their very poor mathematical acquirements, but by the miserable character of the so-called literary training which they have undergone.
Nothing would help the man of science of the future to rise to the level of his great enterprise more effectually than certain modifications,
