to the investigator but to the pupil the
interest of science is strongest in the growing edges of knowledge.
The student should be transported thither with the briefest possible
delay. Details of those parts of science which by present means of
investigation are worked out and reduced to general expressions are
dull and lifeless. Many and many a boy has been repelled, gathering
from what he hears in class that science is a catalogue of names and
facts interminable.

In childhood he may have felt curiosity about nature and the common
impulse to watch and collect, but when he begins scientific lessons he
discovers too often that they relate not even to the kind of fact
which nature is for him, or to the subjects of his early curiosity and
wonder, but to things that have no obvious interest at all,
measurements of mechanical forces, reaction-formulae, and similar
materials.

All these, it is true, man has gradually accumulated with infinite
labour; upon them, and of such materials has the great fabric of
science been reared: but to insist that the approaches to science
shall be open only to those who will surmount these gratuitous
obstacles is mere perversity. Men's minds do not work in that way. How
many would discover the grandeur of a Gothic building if they were
prevented from seeing one until they could work out stresses and
strains, date mouldings, and even perhaps cut templates? Most of us,
to be sure, enjoy the cathedrals more when we acquire some such
knowledge, and those who are to be architects must acquire it, but we
can scarcely be astonished if beginners turn away in disgust from
science presented on those terms.

It is from considerations of this kind that I am led to believe that
for most boys the easiest and most attractive introduction to science
is from the biological side. Admittedly chemistry is the more
fundamental study, and some rudimentary chemical notions must be
imparted very early, but if the framework subject-matter be animals
and plants, very sensible progress in realising what science means and
aims at doing will have been made before the things of daily life are
left behind. These first formal lessons in science should continue and
extend the boy's own attempts to find out how the world is made.

I shall be charged with running counter both to common sense and to
authority in expressing parenthetically the further conviction that,
in biology at least, laboratory work is now largely over