Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/128

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

with which its elements unite. Unless he is brought into actual contact with the facts, and taught to observe and bring them into relation with the science evolved from them, it were better that instruction in science should be left alone, for one of the first lessons he must learn from science is not to trust in authority, but to demand proof for each asseveration. . . . Such education," he added, "cannot be begun too early. The whole yearnings of a child are for the natural phenomena around, until they are smothered by the ignorance of the parent. He is a young Linnæus, roaming over the fields in search of flowers. He is a young conchologist or mineralogist, gathering shells or pebbles on the sea-shore. He is an ornithologist, and goes bird-nesting; an ichthyologist, and catches fish. Glorious education in nature all this, if the teacher knew how to direct and utilize it. . . . Do not suppose that I wish the primary school to be a lecture-theatre for all or any of the 'ologies.' All the science which would be necessary to give a boy a taste of the principles involved in his calling, and an incitement to pursue them in his future life, might be given in illustration of other subjects. . . . I deny that the utilitarian view of primary education is ignoble. The present system is truly ignoble, for it sends the working-man into the world in gross ignorance of everything he is to do in it. The utilitarian system is noble, in so far as it treats him as an intelligent being, who ought to understand the nature of his occupation and the principles involved in it. The great advantage of directing education toward the pursuits and occupations of the people, instead of wasting it on dismal verbalism, is that, while it elevates the individual, it at the same time gives security for the future prosperity of the nation."

In another address, delivered a few days afterward, he spoke of the "Inosculation of the Arts and Sciences," or how they mutually grow out of and build up one another, and of the intimate union between science and labor. "It is not science," he said, "which creates labor or the industries flowing from it. On the contrary, science is the progeny of the industrial arts on the one side, and on the other of the experiences and perceptions which gradually attach themselves to these arts, so that the evolution of science from the arts is the first circumstance of human progress, which, however, quickly receives development and impulse from the science thus evolved. Industrial Labor, then, is one of the parents, and Science the child; but, as often happens in the world, the son becomes richer than the father, and raises his position. . . . Science does not depend upon facts alone, but upon the increase of mental conceptions which can be brought to bear upon them; these conceptions increase as slowly as the common knowledge derived from experience—they both descend by inheritance from one generation to another, until science in its progress becomes a prevision of new knowledge by light reflected from the accumulated common knowledge of the past. In the progress of time common knowl-