d, because they are not well
adapted for examinations. Among these, unfortunately, are our own
literature and language.

It is therefore necessary, even in a short essay which professes to
deal only with generalities, to make some suggestions as to the main
subjects which our education should include. As has been indicated
already, I would divide them into main classes--science and humanism.
Every boy should be instructed in both branches up to a certain point.
We must firmly resist those who wish to make education purely
scientific, those who, in Bacon's words, "call upon men to sell their
books and build furnaces, quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses
and relying upon Vulcan." We want no young specialists of twelve years
old; and a youth without a tincture of humanism can never become

A man foursquare, withouten flaw ywrought.

Of the teaching of science I am not competent to speak. But as an
instrument of mind-training, and even of liberal education, it seems
to me to have a far higher value than is usually conceded to it by
humanists. To direct the imagination to the infinitely great and the
infinitely small, to vistas of time in which a thousand years are as
one day; to the tremendous forces imprisoned in minute particles of
matter; to the amazing complexity of the mechanism by which the organs
of the human body perform their work; to analyse the light which has
travelled for centuries from some distant star; to retrace the history
of the earth and the evolution of its inhabitants--such studies cannot
fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them. They
promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline,
as the Greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and
rhetoric. The air which blows about scientific studies is like the air
of a mountain top--thin, but pure and bracing. And as a subject of
education science has a further advantage which can hardly be
overestimated. It is in science that most of the new discoveries are
being made. "The rapture of the forward view" belongs to science more
than to any other study. We may take it as a well-established
principle in education that the most advanced teachers should be
researchers and discoverers as well as lecturers, and that the rank
and file should be learners as well as instructors. There is no
subject in which this ideal is so nearly attainable as in science.

And yet science, even for its own sake, must no