By personal example first. Teach them that the body is our temple, and the mirror of the soul; that everything we do influences someone for better or for worse. "To walk badly is sinful, as it injures the physical organs. To walk badly is bad manners, for every way of walking expresses something." Bad walking expresses bad things, and is therefore immoral as well as impolite. It is not unlike vulgar slang and violent gestures. Seek to make the children feel that good physical habits are a duty. In conclusion, let me add this thought: The physical training work must not be confined to the ten or fifteen minutes daily given to the exercises, but it must extend to all the acts of the day, for, in the words of Montaigne, "It is not a soul, not a body, we educate it is a man. Out of this one we must not make two." DEPARTMENT. OF SCIENCE INSTRUCTION SECRETARY'S MINUTES FIRST SESSION. WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 1902 The department met in the lecture room of the chemical laboratory of the State University, and was called to order at 2: 30 P. M. by President W. H. Norton. The following was the program of the session: Music-a vocal solo, by Mr. D. Alvin Davies. President's address, "The Teachings of Science," by William H. Norton, professor of geology, Cornell College, Iowa. "The Educational Value of Museums," by Oliver C. Farrington, curator of geology, Field Columbian Museum, Chicago. "The Projection Microscope: Its Possibilities and Value in Teaching Biology," by A. H. Cole, Lake View High School, Chicago. After discussion of the papers a committee on nominations was appointed as follows: C. W. Hall, of Minnesota, C. O. Bates, of Iowa, W. A. Fiske, of Indiana, A. G. Clement, of New York, and J. H. Kimmons of Wisconsin. The department then adjourned. SECOND SESSION.-FRIDAY, JULY 11 The meeting was called to order by President Norton at 2:30 P. M. program was followed: The following Music-vocal solo, "The Erl King," Schubert-by Miss Grace M. Ames. "High-School Instruction in Physics," by F. M. Gilley, High School, Chelsea, Mass. "Physiography in the Secondary Schools," by J. A. Merrill, teacher of science, State Normal School West Superior, Wis. "The Scientific Work of Our Government and its Influence in Secondary Education," by W. J. McGee, ethnologist in charge, Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, D. C. The discussion which followed was led by C. W. Hall, of Minnesota, W. H. Norton, of Iowa, and A. G. Clement, of New York. The report of the Committee on Nominations was read and adopted, and the following officers were elected for the ensuing year: President-C. W. Hall, Minneapolis, Minn. The department then adjourned. EDWARD H. LEHNERTS, Secretary. PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS—THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE` PROFESSOR WILLIAM HARMON NORTON, CORNELL COLLEGE, It is the custom that any words spoken by the chair at this time shall relate to the common interest only. This does not lie in any single science, either in its content or in its method of instruction. We are here as teachers of science, and it is the teaching of science in general, its scope and aim and place in the educational system, that seems to be indicated as an appropriate theme. In suggesting a few of the functions of science teaching, I shall not attempt to arrange them in the order of their importance. In fact, the first I shall mention is that which is probably least often in our thought -the discovery and training of scientific aptitudes. In a broad sense, education is the transmission of the world's knowledge from one generation to another. This rich inheritance cannot be conveyed by libraries and museums, or in any mechanical way. It can be handed on unimpaired only by training men capable of receiving and using it. Vanderbilts and the Rothschilds see to the technical education of their sons in the management of their vast railway and banking properties? How much more does it concern those whom this department represents to take all possible pains in the training of the men of science of the future, the heirs of its wealth? Somewhere in our schools today are the Rowlands and Asa Grays, the Maria Mitchells and the James Halls, of the next generation. There, too, are the thousands of the rank and file who are to do their humbler work in winning the scientific victories of the future. It was in an old log schoolhouse that the genius of Mendenhall was awakened by a good Quaker lady who had the way of setting her pupils to making simple experiments in physics. Early in the century an eminent botanist at the University of Cambridge took one of his students into so intimate a friendship that the young man was known among his fellows as "the one who walks with Professor Henslow." He had been considered a very ordinary boy indeed. His classical schooling, as he himself tells us, had omitted all habits of observation and reasoning. But Henslow discovers the marvelous scientific aptitudes of young Darwin, he secures him a place as naturalist on the ship "Beagle," and to the friendship of that teacher Darwin attributes "more influence on his career than any other." Whether in country school or in college, the teacher who discovers talent to itself, who directs it to its goal and helps it on its way, may be doing his generation a greater service than money can render, in endowments however munificent. It may possibly be true that genius needs no discovery; that it will blaze forth from beneath any smother of adverse circumstances. Possibly Rowland would still have been Rowland even if his father had refused to listen to his pathetic cry at classical Andover, "O, take me home!" and had not removed him to the congenial environment of the Rensselaer Polytechnic. But without question the vast majority of science workers owe their efficiency to those whom we here represent. Without science instruction their scientific aptitudes would never have come to fruitage, for faculties which in childhood give every promise of large development may be so repressed in youth that they remain stunted forever. How much science should there be in our schools? Enough so that all the way from primary school to university there shall never be a single year in which the scientific aptitudes of our pupils may not be developed by the study of nature at first hand. These boys in our classes who are to be workers in science may not be particularly brilliant; they may not shine in recitation as do those young intellects which are made with the capacity of the gelatine copying pad and can as faithfully reproduce the phrases of the text. They may ask inconvenient questions; they certainly have a high degree of individual initiative; they may be restive under routine. But in the field and laboratory we shall discover in them a marked ability to see, to co-ordinate, and to interpret. 66 Let me suggest that we enter sympathetically into whatever scientific interests of these boys may at the time be strongest. If they are in the collecting stage," we may gently divert them from postage stamps to flowers, fossils, or butterflies; we may see that their collections are studied with something of the care that Oswald Heer gave his plants, Darwin his beetles, and that made the cabinet of young Spencer Baird the nucleus of the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. If we find in our boys a greater liking for their furry, finned, and feathered friends alive and at home than dead and on the dissecting table, let us see that the laboratory does not repress this normal turning of the young naturalist to out-ofdoor study. I do not mean to imply that the cadets of science need instruction of a sort different from that of their fellows. The teaching which best brings out scientific aptitudes is precisely that, which every student should have; it is that which performs the second function I shall mention of science teaching; it brings in touch with nature. Science teaching is objective; its impressions are at first hand; it brings face to face with facts. How weak and vague, how illusory and fleeting, is the impression of the word compared with that of the thing! It is our peculiar privilege to teach things, not words. In this presence I need not attempt to slay means common. again the slain and say aught against the bookish teaching of science. After all, it is perhaps as worth while as the bookish teaching of anything else. I do not know why fourteen weeks in physics or geology is not as good as fourteen weeks in Grecian history or political economy. But the text-book teaching of science is so markedly inferior to the laboratory method that it is fast disappearing from our schools. In chemistry, physics, and biology it has well-nigh gone. But in the earth sciences the new and fruitful methods of study in the laboratory and field are by no How many well-equipped physiographic laboratories can any of us count in his own state in colleges, normal schools, and universities, to say nothing of high schools? And in how many public schools are such fundamental notions as the weathering of rocks and the work of streams still taught from the printed page instead of in the field? Last fall I asked the students in my different courses in geology in Cornell College how many of them when in high school or academy had ever taken an excursion in geography or physiography. And there were but four out of 120 students who had ever been taught anything in these two subjects outside the schoolroom. The enthusiastic visitor at a great museum who was so anxious to handle the feldspars in one of the cases, because she had been teaching feldspar to her pupils for fourteen years and had never before seen the mineral to know it, belongs, I fear, to a type not yet extinct. No matter what or how much we omit from the text-book, let us teach first and foremost, as critically and as fully as possible, whatever can be seen and handled, drawn and described, and verified by experiment. We may leave to others to teach how to con the printed page and to assimilate and reproduce its ideas. It rests with us to train the quick eye and the skillful hand, to teach the patient investigation of nature. I once asked Dr. Alexander Winchell if he found his seniors in geology at the University of Michigan good observers. Yes, he answered, unless they have had too much Latin and Greek. Apart from science studies, a college course may easily dim the eye and leave one a duller student of things than when he entered. If science is rightly taught in our schools no one need ever say, as the distinguished president of an American university recently confessed: "The best teacher I ever had was the kindly old neighborhood loafer, who roamed the woods with me and told me the times of the wild flowers and the habits of the birds." It is because scientific culture is objective that it has an ethical value wholly different from that of any culture largely subjective, such as literature, art, or philosophy. Edward Everett Hale has told of the good he got when a boy from setting type in his father's office: "The absolute accuracy which is necessary is good for a boy. The solid fact that 144 ems will go in a given space and will require that space, and that no prayers nor tears nor hopes nor fears will change that solid fact - this is |