SCIENCE AND ITS TEACHERS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5010, 14 April 1877, Page 2 (Supplement)

SCIENCE AND ITS TEACHERS.

(From the Canadian Monthly.)

Glance at but one sign of the times—the eagerness with which any real master of science—a Huxley, a Tyndall, or a Proctor—is listened to whenever, forsaking the study of the laboratory, he comes before the public as a lecturer. It is not the learned only who flock to hear him ; but multitudes of average men and women go to get what instruction they can. They feel their need of it ; they know that this is a real world in which they live ; they are beginning to have some perception of the immutability of its laws ; and, what these laws are, they fain would learn. The gifted scientific teacher occupies indeed a position of great privilege, and, let me add, of great responsibility. He may not succeed in awakening —as of course he does not aim at awakening—those violent emotions which follow upon certain methods of teaching, He neither shouts, nor sings, nor contorts his body, nor heaps up incongruous imagery, nor revels in anecdotes, nor indulges in weak sentimentalism, nor gives way to grotesque violence of language ; but he touches the understanding, and shapes opinions, and moulds purposes. It behoves him, therefore, to use his great power with strict conscientiousness for the wisest ends. He must be careful, above all, not to engender a conceit of knowledge on the part of his hearers, nor to illustrate it by anything in his own manner or language. He should caution his hearers against substituting blind deference to his authority, or to any scientific authority, for the blind deference they may have hitherto paid to other authorities. He should speak with certainty only of the known, and with proper reserve of what is only probable or purely hypothetical. He should dwell upon the great truth that emancipation from error means responsibility for a higher mode of life ; and that, if it does not result in this, it is valueless, if not worse than valueless, in causing truth to bo evil spoken of. Ho should insist strongly on the difference between real knowledge and sham knowledge ; between a true insight into facts and grasp of principles on the one hand, and a mere command of phrases on the other. Lot him do these things, and abound in doing them, and ho will quickly be recognised as the highest type of teacher in this generation. The function of science is to interpret to man the world in which ho lives, and especially the material conditions on which his well-being depends. It explains to him the properties of matter and the constitution of his own physical nature. It is concerned with questions of cause and effect, or antecedent and sequence. It gives him, in regard o many things, a power of provision which to his ancestors would have seemed simply miraculous. It enables him' to wield with ease and certainty some of the mightiest and subtlest forces of nature, It places at his

services agencies, such as electricity and magnetism, which as yet far outrun his powers of comprehension. It carries him into regions of the invisible and impalpable, and exhibits to him wonders that utterly dwarf the direct revelations of sense, and seem at times to threaten the fundamental postulates of his philosophy. Science, we may say, is the minister of man’s thinking faculty; or we may regard it as the product of that faculty working according to its own laws, just as honey is the product of the instinctive labors of the bee. Manifestly, so long as man thinks, and so long as he has an inexhaustible universe to think in, science must advance ; we can set no limit to its conquests. Unless human powers at some point in the future begin to fail, it must continue its beneficent career, giving man wider and wider control over nature, and thus increasing the advantages, and decreasing the disadvantages, of his lot upon earth,