“Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend on his winning or losing a game of chess, don’t you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check?  Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight?

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and more or less of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess.  It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own.  The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.  The player on the other side is hidden from us.  We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient.  But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.  To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength, and one who plays ill is checkmated—­without haste, but without remorse.”

Huxley wished that this scientific education should begin at an early period of every child’s training.  In 1869 he wrote: 

“Let every child be instructed in those general views of the phaenomena of nature for which we have no exact English name.  The nearest approximation to a name for what I mean which we possess is physical geography; the Germans have a better, ‘Erdkunde’ (earth knowledge or geology in its etymological sense), that is to say, a general knowledge of the earth, and what is on it and in it and about it.  If anyone who has experience of the ways of young children will call to mind their questions, he will find that so far as they can be put in any scientific category, they will come under this head of ‘Erdkunde.’  The child asks, ’What is the moon, and why does it shine?’ ’What is this water, and where does it run?’ ‘What is the wind?’ ’What makes these waves in the sea?’ ’Where does this animal live, and what is the use of that plant?’ And if not snubbed and stunted by being told not to ask foolish questions, there is no limit to the intellectual craving of a young child; nor any bounds to the slow but solid accretion of knowledge and development of the thinking faculty in this way.  To all such questions, answers which are necessarily incomplete, though true as far as they go, may be given by any teacher whose ideas represent real knowledge