question, and whose completeness of delivery all who study its utterances will appreciate. School-masters anxious to teach science, and doubtful how to set about it, will meet all the facts which can enlighten them in the appendices to the report. They will find lists of accredited text-books, specimens of examination-papers, varieties of school time-tables, priced catalogues of apparatus, syllabi of lectures and experiments, botanical schedules and tables, plans and descriptions of laboratories, workshops, museums, botanic gardens; programmes and reports of school, scientific, and natural history societies. They will learn how costly a temple could be built to science at Rugby, and how modestly it could be housed at Taunton. They will see how Mr. Foster teaches physics, how Mr. Hale teaches geography, how Mr. Wilson teaches Erdkunde. And they will accept all this as coming from men who have a right to speak, and who wield an experience such as has not been amassed before. On any legislative change which impends over the system and the endowments of the higher English education, the body of scientific opinion is strong enough, if united, to impress its own convictions; disunion alone can paralyze it. All who feel the discredit of past neglect, its injury to our national, intellect, and its danger to our national prosperity, will do well to support by unqualified adhesion the first attempt that has been made to probe its causes, and the first consistent and well-considered scheme that has been put forth for its removal.—Nature.
| MODERN BIOLOGICAL INQUIRY.[1] |
By Dr. JOHN L. LE CONTE.
THE founders of science in America, and the other great students of Nature, who have in previous years occupied the elevated position in which I now stand, have addressed you upon many momentous subjects. In fulfilling the final duty assigned to your Presidents by the laws of the Association, some have spoken to you in solemn and wise words concerning the duties and privileges of men of science, and the converse duties of the nation toward those earnest and disinterested promoters of knowledge. Others, again, have given you the history of the development of their respective branches of study, and their present condition, and have, in eloquent diction, commended to your gratitude those who have established on a firm foundation the basis of our modern systems of investigation.
The recent changes in our constitution, by which you are led to
- ↑ Address of the retiring President delivered at the Detroit meeting of the American Association for thee Advancement of Science.
