Science & Education eBook

Further, we need what, for want of a better name, I must call Physical Geography.  What I mean is that which the Germans call “Erdkunde.”  It is a description of the earth, of its place and relation to other bodies; of its general structure, and of its great features—­winds, tides, mountains, plains:  of the chief forms of the vegetable and animal worlds, of the varieties of man.  It is the peg upon which the greatest quantity of useful and entertaining scientific information can be suspended.

Literature is not upon the College programme; but I hope some day to see it there.  For literature is the greatest of all sources of refined pleasure, and one of the great uses of a liberal education is to enable us to enjoy that pleasure.  There is scope enough for the purposes of liberal education in the study of the rich treasures of our own language alone.  All that is needed is direction, and the cultivation of a refined taste by attention to sound criticism.  But there is no reason why French and German should not be mastered sufficiently to read what is worth reading in those languages with pleasure and with profit.

And finally, by and by, we must have History; treated not as a succession of battles and dynasties; not as a series of biographies; not as evidence that Providence has always been on the side of either Whigs or Tories; but as the development of man in times past, and in other conditions than our own.

But, as it is one of the principles of our College to be self-supporting, the public must lead, and we must follow, in these matters.  If my hearers take to heart what I have said about liberal education, they will desire these things, and I doubt not we shall be able to supply them.  But we must wait till the demand is made.

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Footnotes: 

[1] For a justification of what is here said about these schools, see that valuable book, Essays on a Liberal Education, passim.

V

SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION:  NOTES OF AN AFTER-DINNER SPEECH

[1869]

[Mr. Thackeray, talking of after-dinner speeches, has lamented that “one never can recollect the fine things one thought of in the cab,” in going to the place of entertainment.  I am not aware that there are any “fine things” in the following pages, but such as there are stand to a speech which really did get itself spoken, at the hospitable table of the Liverpool Philomathic Society, more or less in the position of what “one thought of in the cab.”]

The introduction of scientific training into the general education of the country is a topic upon which I could not have spoken, without some more or less apologetic introduction, a few years ago.  But upon this, as upon other matters, public opinion has of late undergone a rapid modification.  Committees of both Houses of the Legislature have agreed that something must