It is from considerations of this kind that I am led to believe that for most boys the easiest and most attractive introduction to science is from the biological side.  Admittedly chemistry is the more fundamental study, and some rudimentary chemical notions must be imparted very early, but if the framework subject-matter be animals and plants, very sensible progress in realising what science means and aims at doing will have been made before the things of daily life are left behind.  These first formal lessons in science should continue and extend the boy’s own attempts to find out how the world is made.

I shall be charged with running counter both to common sense and to authority in expressing parenthetically the further conviction that, in biology at least, laboratory work is now largely overdone.  Whether this is so at schools I cannot tell, but at the universities whole mornings and afternoons spent in making elaborate preparations, drawings and series of sections, are frequently wasted.  These courses were devised with the highest motives.  Students were to “find out everything for themselves.”  Generally they are doing nothing of the kind.  It may have been so once, but with text-books perfected and teaching stereotyped, the more industrious are slavishly verifying what has been verified repeatedly, or at best acquiring manipulative skill.  The rest are doing nothing whatever.  They would be better employed taking a walk, devilling for some investigator, browsing in museums or libraries, or even arguing with each other.  Certainly a few lessons in the use of indexes and books of reference would be far more valuable.  Students of every grade must of course do some laboratory work, and all should see as much material as possible.  My protest is solely against those long, torpid hours compulsorily given to labour which will lead to nothing of novelty, and serves only to teach what can be got readily in other ways.  There are a few whose souls crave such employment.  By all means let them follow it.

But whatever is good for maturer students, biology for schoolboys should be of a less academic cast.

The natural history of animals and plants has the obvious merit that it prolongs the inborn curiosity of youth, that its subject-matter is universally at hand, accessible in holidays and in the absence of teachers or laboratories, and best of all that through biological study the significance of science appears immediately, disclosing the true story of man’s relation to the world.  From natural history the transition to the other sciences, especially to chemistry and physics, is easy and again natural.  In the study of life many of the fundamental conceptions of those sciences are met with on the threshold, and boys whose aptitudes are rather of the physical order will at once feel the impulse to follow nature from that aspect.  Biology is the more inclusive study.  A man may be a good chemist and miss the broad meaning of science altogether, being sometimes indeed more devoid of such comprehension than many a philosopher fresh from Classical Greats.