tories, suitable apparatus and trained teachers, who are allowed time both in and out of school for preparation. Assuming that there has been allotted to the physics teacher sufficient laboratory space (and this is far greater than is generally provided by the architect), the next problem is to obtain good working apparatus, one piece per pupil for each experiment. As an appropriation sufficient to provide apparatus for the entire list of exercises in the course is seldom made at one time, it is generally best to use the money as far as it will go in procuring enough apparatus for a few exercises and teach by the labora tory method as far as the apparatus will allow. Since some of the simpler apparatus may well be made by the teacher, a part of the appropriation should be spent for tools and raw material. The cost of stock for a set of apparatus for 25 quantitative and several qualitative experiments covering the subject of light is less than $1 a pupil. And this estimate includes a few things, lenses, prisms, etc., which the teacher would not dream of making. The lack of equipment should not stand in the way of an introduction of the laboratory method of teaching physics. In asking for an appropriation, the argument might be made that a city or town that can afford to employ a science teacher can not afford to fail to supply that teacher with tools of his trade.

However small the annual appropriation, a constant attempt must be made to increase the equipment, and in certain portions it should be complete, with apparatus for the individual pupil. Whatever is the size of the school, there should be an appropriation for physics just as surely as the seasons come round. It is not the best course to spend this all in one lump sum. Several times a year the way should be open to buy supplies as they are needed. Is there a large business anywhere in which the year's supply is contracted for and purchased at one time? Some department of the national government perhaps. You all know what is the effect there on the cost of production and the time of completion.

The class laboratory method, then, requires a complete equipment for any exercise attempted, spare periods during school

sessions for preparation, freedom from petty responsibilities before and after school and a laboratory assistant. The setting up, clearing away, preparation and repair of apparatus, and, during an exercise, the distribution of materials, much of the cleaning of the laboratory, arranging for lecture demonstrations, and correcting exercises can be done as well by an assistant costing from a half to a tenth the salary of the teacher, who is left free for more and better work. If much of the routine work of the laboratory is drudgery, is it profitable to employ a $1000 or $2000 drudge? To test and put in order the apparatus for the slide wire exercise as I have described it, to prepare the known and unknown resistances, several hours are required of work that an inexperienced assistant can do after working a few minutes with the teacher. The teacher should be employed to teach and do such work as can not be done by assistants. The colleges have for years made profitable use of laboratory assistants. Many a teacher drawing a salary of $2000 to $3000 occupies half or more than half his time in doing what could be better done by a $300 assistant. Is it strange that physics teachers have so little time to study?

The teacher must know his subject. He must read the scientific and mechanical journals, glance through the magazines in search of popular presentations of new discoveries, ever striving to get a broad glimpse of the field traversed by the progress of science. He can not however study experimentally the fundamental principles of physics, and obtain firsthand means for illustrating his talks and lectures unless he has acquired some skill in the use of tools. Newton made his own apparatus. Faraday wound and insulated his wire. That, to be sure, would be poor economy today, but there are other things as useful as insulated wire that you must prepare yourself. The simplest portions, and by that I mean the very simplest of the tinsmith's, gasfitter's, blacksmith's, machinist's, carpenter's, glass-blower's and manufacturing optician's trades are all useful. How much more real are lenses to you and your classes if you have one you have ground and polished! How simple the principle of the

thermometer becomes, if you blow and finish a crude model before their eyes! You will find after you have acquired some mechanical skill, that the apparatus always works, and timeworn apologies for failure are things of the past. A broken galvanometer suspension means 10 to 30 minutes time at the bench to make good, in place of several hours of correspondence, and days of waiting for the apparatus to be sent to a distance and the damage repaired.

In closing, let me remind you that in demanding adequate equipment and time on the program for physics, you should call attention to the fact that home work can be assigned after the first lesson, much of it of a kind, problems, questions, diagrams, plotting, etc., that is definite and is easily corrected; and the pupil's application to his work and his progress can be tested from the very start.

Further, you are demanding a place for a study that should be preliminary to all other sciences. Without a ready knowledge of physics, meteorology is little more than a landsman's guess of the weather, astronomy a popular and meaningless description of planets and stars, and chemistry is unnecessarily difficult and in portions unintelligible.

Prof. Osborn, of Olivet College, quotes the leading physicist of this country as saying that, to train his powers of observation and classification, let the student study natural history; to give care in experimenting and convince the student that nature forgives no errors, let him enter the chemical laboratory; to train him in exact and logical reasoning, let him study mathematics; but, to combine all this training in one, let him study physics.

Section B. BIOLOGY

IDEALS IN TEACHING

BY PROF. ALBRO D. MORRILL, HAMILTON COLLEGE

[Abstract]

Among the ideals which have dominated students of natural history, at different times, only three need our attention, on account of their prominence in modern teaching of the natural

sciences. The first is classification, or taxonomy, an important branch of knowledge; but, when it absorbs the whole attention, as it did less than 20 years ago, in our schools, it gives but meager results, as some of us know by experience.

The plan of mounting and labeling plants and animals was later largely replaced by the study of types or examples. This change was greatly aided in this country by Huxley and Martin's Elements of Biology, since followed by scores of other works. This led to a more thorough understanding of the structure of plants and animals, also of their relationships, than the examination of the external form with a view to classifying them. This study of types has been associated in teaching with evolution, though historically the latter is much the younger. In the study of evolution, variations in domestic and wild forms of animal and plant life and their adaptation to changed or changing environment and struggle for existence divided the field with embryology, where, working on the basis of von Baer's law, the attempt was made to reconstruct the ancestral types of the different groups of plants and animals. Today we may find these ideals, together with the physiologic one, separately or combined with each other in ecology.

Much might be said in favor of emphasizing the physiologic ideal, as plants and animals must be studied as living organisms to gain a full understanding of the many problems involved in classification and morphology.

As we always have the poor with us and often without any fault of theirs, so we have teachers of science whose highest ideal, in practice at least, is to get as many pupils through the examinations as possible, and to whom the teaching of old examination papers takes the place of something better. I said it is not always the teachers' fault, for they are often given insufficient time or equipment, and real science is not a subject to be swallowed whole and disgorged in chunks in an examination. Then there are cases where the school authorities, teacher or pupils, or all, may be unable to see any use in a subject which is not immediately useful and capable of being coined into dollars.

There are, unfortunately, among the university-trained men who are teaching in high schools or colleges, too large a number who consider the work of teaching a bore and who devote their time to their own researches. It is not intended to decry research, as it is of the greatest importance, but too great a devotion to it.

In elementary work, at least, the pupil is of much more importance than the subject; but there are those who are more disturbed if they can not present the subject symmetrically than they would be to know that they were developing in their pupils a positive hatred of the subject and the worst methods of study. There are two principal methods of conducting laboratory work and many variations. In one, lectures and demonstrations precede the work of the student, and the time in the laboratory is devoted to the verification of the outlines furnished or of reference books consulted. In the other observation by the pupil, aided by brief and simple questions, is made the preparation for consulting reference books under the guidance of a careful instructor, who aims to help the pupil to help himself rather than to tell him that which he can see with his own eyes. This is followed by a class conference, where comparisons are made and notes taken to help in looking up the disputed points. Then the instructor can, by demonstrations and explanations, supplement the work of the pupil. Thus the pupil, with a nucleus of his own carefully sifted observations and with the interest generally aroused, attracts facts as a magnet does iron filings. The latter method requires however an experienced teacher to prevent discouragement and to develop the pupil's self-reliance.

The pupil who takes up a science for the first time after reaching the age of 15 to 19, as we often find the student doing in college, has in too many cases been taught to be the passive recipient of the ideas of the book or instructor. The book is to him a fetish. Many of us have undoubtedly seen some of these devotees searching (surreptitiously) for drawings or descriptions. in some reference work and sometimes handing in pictures of an animal of a different species from the one which they were supposed to study.