Natural Science is now occupying a more and more important place in
education. Oxford, Cambridge, the London University, the public
schools, one after another, are taking up the subject in earnest; so
are the middle-class schools; so I trust will all primary schools
throughout the country; and I hope that my children, at least, if not
I myself, will see the day, when ignorance of the primary laws and
facts of science will be looked on as a defect, only second to
ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.
I speak strongly, but deliberately. It does seem to me strange, to
use the mildest word, that people whose destiny it is to live, even
for a few short years, on this planet which we call the earth, and
who do not at all intend to live on it as hermits, shutting
themselves up in cells, and looking on death as an escape and a
deliverance, but intend to live as comfortably and wholesomely as
they can, they and their children after them--it seems strange, I
say, that such people should in general be so careless about the
constitution of this same planet, and of the laws and facts on which
depend, not merely their comfort and their wealth, but their health
and their very lives, and the health and the lives of their children
and descendants.
I know some will say, at least to themselves: "What need for us to
study science? There are plenty to do that already; and we shall be
sure sooner or later to profit by their discoveries; and meanwhile it
is not science which is needed to make mankind thrive, but simple
common sense.
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