strange conceptions, and in awakening their
dormant and wholly untrained powers of observation and of manipulation.
It is difficult to overestimate the magnitude of the obstacles which are
thrown in the way of scientific training by the existing system of
school education. Not only are men trained in mere book-work, ignorant
of what observation means, but the habit of learning from books alone
begets a disgust of observation. The book-learned student will rather
trust to what he sees in a book than to the witness of his own eyes.

There is not the least reason why this should be so, and, in fact, when
elementary education becomes that which I have assumed it ought to be,
this state of things will no longer exist. There is not the slightest
difficulty in giving sound elementary instruction in physics, in
chemistry, and in the elements of human physiology, in ordinary schools.
In other words, there is no reason why the student should not come to
the medical school, provided with as much knowledge of these several
sciences as he ordinarily picks up, in the course of his first year of
attendance, at the medical school.

I am not saying this without full practical justification for the
statement. For the last eighteen years we have had in England a system
of elementary science teaching carried out under the auspices of the
Science and Art Department, by which elementary scientific instruction
is made readily accessible to the scholars of all the elementary schools
in the country. Commencing with small beginnings, carefully developed
and improved, that system now brings up for examination as many as seven
thousand scholars in the subject of human physiology alone. I can say
that, out of that number, a large proportion have acquired a fair amount
of substantial knowledge; and that no inconsiderable percentage show as
good an acquaintance with human physiology as used to be exhibited by
the average candidates for medical degrees in the University of London,
when I was first an examiner there twenty years ago; and quite as much
knowledge as is possessed by the ordinary student of medicine at the
present day. I am justified, therefore, in looking forward to the time
when the student who proposes to devote himself to medicine will come,
not absolutely raw and inexperienced as he is at present, but in a
certain state of preparation for further study; and I look to the
university to help him still further forward in that stage of