master, to get
the boys to draw up an ideal time-table. The results, as a rule, are
disappointingly conventional, it is true. Few boys have ever
criticised their education, except in a purely destructive and cynical
spirit, and when confronted with the constructive task, produce
something not very far removed from the time-table they follow out
every week. But as regards science, it will often be found that the
form falls into two clearly marked divisions. One part cut it down to
a minimum, and would, if they had the courage of their convictions, cut
it out altogether; the other part give it half, or more than half, the
time-table. This probably marks the fact that for many boys a very
small amount of laboratory experience, just enough to give them a
notion of method, is all that they will benefit by. For the rest the
training has real value and interest; but these are a minority.

But there is another aspect of science, receiving as yet far too little
attention at school, which seems to us an essential part of a liberal
education. Indeed, when our own sixth form time-table was remodelled,
we put in a claim for a weekly lecture on General Principles of
Science, alongside with modern history and political science and
economics. The general principles of natural law, evolution and
heredity, the nature and cure of disease, the atomic theory of matter,
general principles of astronomy--these things seem to us second only in
importance to the great principles of politics themselves. Here is an
extraordinary record of patient achievement, some contact with which is
in itself an inspiration not merely intellectual, but moral. For it
seems to us hardly fanciful to suggest that such knowledge should
react--so subtle are the reactions of the boy-mind, as we have already
tried to show--most favourably on the political spirit. Dr. Gregory,
in his enthusiastic work in praise of his subject, "Discovery: or the
Spirit and Service of Science," writes: "In the discussion of political
questions, prejudice and party determine the view taken, and facts are
selected and exploited not so much with the object of arriving at the
truth as to confound the other side.... A politician may place party
above truth, and a diplomatist will conceal it on behalf of his
country, but it is the duty of the man of science to attain truth at
all costs. In direct opposition to the narrowness of thought which
views all subjects through the distor