It is my firm conviction that the only way to remedy it is to make the elements of physical science an integral part of primary education.  I have endeavoured to show you how that may be done for that branch of science which it is my business to pursue; and I can but add, that I should look upon the day when every schoolmaster throughout this land was a centre of genuine, however rudimentary, scientific knowledge, as an epoch in the history of the country.

But let me entreat you to remember my last words.  Addressing myself to you, as teachers, I would say, mere book learning in physical science is a sham and a delusion—­what you teach, unless you wish to be impostors, that you must first know; and real knowledge in science means personal acquaintance with the facts, be they few or many.[2]

[Footnote 2:  It has been suggested to me that these words may be taken to imply a discouragement on my part of any sort of scientific instruction which does not give an acquaintance with the facts at first hand.  But this is not my meaning.  The ideal of scientific teaching is, no doubt, a system by which the scholar sees every fact for himself, and the teacher supplies only the explanations.  Circumstances, however, do not often allow of the attainment of that ideal, and we must put up with the next best system—­one in which the scholar takes a good deal on trust from a teacher, who, knowing the facts by his own knowledge, can describe them with so much vividness as to enable his audience to form competent ideas concerning them.  The system which I repudiate is that which allows teachers who have not come into direct contact with the leading facts of a science to pass their second-hand information on.  The scientific virus, like vaccine lymph, if passed through too long a succession of organisms, will lose all its effect in protecting the young against the intellectual epidemics to which they are exposed.

[The remarks on p. 222 applied to the Natural History Collection of the British Museum in 1861.  The visitor to the Natural History Museum in 1894 need go no further than the Great Hall to see the realisation of my hopes by the present Director.]]

VIII

BIOGENESIS AND ABIOGENESIS

(THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE FOR 1870)

It has long been the custom for the newly installed President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to take advantage of the elevation of the position in which the suffrages of his colleagues had, for the time, placed him, and, casting his eyes around the horizon of the scientific world, to report to them what could be seen from his watch-tower; in what directions the multitudinous divisions of the noble army of the improvers of natural knowledge were marching; what important strongholds of the great enemy of us all, ignorance, had been recently captured; and, also, with due impartiality, to mark where the advanced posts of science had been driven in, or a long-continued siege had made no progress.