< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu
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148

POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tem. Even where these well-trained officers are not in command, their influence is felt, and every member of the organization works in accordance with their more efficient systems. The whole nation is rapidly learning how to make the most and best of its powers, as well as how to profit by growing opportunities and acquisitions.

Thomas Huxley, admittedly an authority on the subject of scientific training, said, in his Mason College address:

"Neither the discipline nor the subject-matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time on either." . . . "For the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education."

Huxley was a member of nearly all the royal commissions on education of his time, and had large opportunities for observation and investigation in this field. His views were founded on extensive and rare experience and sound knowledge; none could speak with greater authority. He says in one of his addresses on this subject:

"The great mass of mankind have neither the liking nor the aptitude for either literary or scientific or artistic pursuits; nor, indeed, for excellence of any sort. Their ambition is to go through life with moderate exertion and a fair share of ease, doing common things in a common way. And a great blessing and a comfort it is that the majority of men are of this mind; for the majority of things to be done are common things, and are quite well enough done when commonly done. The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are heavy and stupid from undigested learning, as others are from over-fulness of meat and drink. But a small percentage of the population is born with that most excellent quality, the desire for excellence, or with special aptitude of some sort or other. . . . Now, the most important object of all educational schemes is to catch those exceptional people and turn them to account for the good of society. No man can say where they will crop up; like their opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear sometimes in the palace, sometimes in the hovel; but the great thing aimed at, I was almost going to say the important end of all social arrangements, is to keep these glorious sports of Nature from being corrupted by luxury or starved by poverty, and to put them into the positions in which they can do the work for which they are specially fitted. . . . I weigh my words well when I say that if the nation could purchase a potential Watt or Davy or Faraday at the cost of a hundred thousand pounds down, he would be dirt cheap at the money."[1]

But our modern educations are producing many Watts and Davys and Faradays, and as progress continues and research becomes more and more the privilege of these 'glorious sports of Nature,' and as more and more men of genius become revealed by systematic, scientific education, the outcome must inevitably be a vastly more complete exploration of

  1. ↑ Mitchell's sketch of The Life and Work of Huxley; Leaders in Science Series; Putnams; 1900; Chap. XI.
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