I'RAINING FOR SCIENTIFIC PROFESSIONS. 555 
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average students, of students who need to be encouraged and strengthened, 
and yet should be firmly weaned before they leave their alma mater. For 
such are needed all the exercises which can help to break them of leaning 
on their teachers, leaning on their books, and leaning on their fellows, 
and to build up habits of wise self-reliance. 
The tyro in arithmetic looks at a question in the book, and minds only 
the figures. He adds them, and finds that the result is far out of the 
way. Then he subtracts, and is still wrong. Then he multiplies, and per- 
chance gets the required number. Now he can do the sum in recitation, 
but can give no other reason except that multiplying gives the answer in 
she book. Alas! too often in the higher mathematics the student is sat- 
isfied if by various tentative combinations he at last obtains the figures or 
the algebraic expression that the author gives. It is but a temporary cor- 
rection of such mechanical floundering to point out, or by Socratic ques- 
tioning to draw out, the explanation. Put the young man in the laboratory 
or in the field, give him the proper instruments, and let him use his own 
eyes, his own hands, his own wits, and make and solve real questions. 
By so doing you will inspire the dry bones of science with the breath of 
life ; you will take the listless learner out of the land of dim shadows 
nto the region of stirring realities. If you would make interest interest- 
Ing, instead of asking the boy in so many words to find how much ¢ dol- 
lars will earn in 4 years and ¢ days, lay before him a real note of hand and 
let him calculate its present value. One who has actually done so much 
domestic engineering as is involved in buying and laying a carpet, will 
not try to solve a similar problem, as we have known a score of teachers to 
do, by reducing the floor area to square inches and dividing by the num- 
oer of square inches in a yard of the fabric. regardless of the distinctly 
specified size of the pattern. 
To make theoretical instruction effective it should be carried along side 
oy side with practical applications. In other words, text-books and lec- 
sures need to be supplemented by laboratory work in all branches. Some 
who will not understand school methods have said that there can be no 
real application till the fledgling engineer has found a place and has 
before him the apparatus that is actually used on the large scale. It is true 
he has much to learn, but he should have learned in school how to teach 
himself. The superintendent and the master workman nowadays cannot 
spend time to instruct him. No busy man wants an assistant who is con- 
stantly asking what he must do nest and how he must do it. Apprentice- 
ship is obsolete, and instruction is tacitly relegated to the schools, for there 
it can be given most economically. It is by no means necessary that one 
should have the largest operations to learn from. The chemist cannot, 
indeed, safely go at once from working with centigrams in a platinum cru- 
cible to tons in a reverberatory furnace. But the metallurgical labora- 
tory should bridge over the gap by affording him the experimental rever-