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SCIENTIFIC CULTURE,
_AND OTHER ESSAYS_.
BY
JOSIAH PARSONS COOKE, LL. D.,
PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY AND MINERALOGY, IN HARVARD COLLEGE.
_SECOND EDITION; WITH ADDITIONS._
NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
1, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET.
1885.
COPYRIGHT, 1881, 1885,
BY JOSIAH PARSONS COOKE.
TO
MY ASSOCIATES
IN
THE CHEMICAL LABORATORY
OF
HARVARD COLLEGE
THIS VOLUME
IS
AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
PREFACE.
The essays collected in this volume, although written for special
occasions without reference to each other, have all a bearing on the
subject selected as the title of the volume, and are an outcome of a
somewhat large experience in teaching physical science to college
students. Thirty years ago, when the writer began his work at Cambridge,
instruction in the experimental sciences was given in our American
colleges solely by means of lectures and recitations. Chemistry and
Physics were allowed a limited space in the college curriculum as
branches of useful knowledge, but were regarded as wholly subordinate to
the classics and mathematics as a means of education; and as physical
science was then taught, there can be no question that the accepted
opinion was correct. Experimental science can never be made of value as
a means of education unless taught by its own methods, with the one
great aim in view to train the faculties of the mind so as to enable the
educated man to read the Book of Nature for himself.
Since the period just referred to, the example early set at Cambridge of
making the student's own observations in the laboratory or cabinet the
basis of all teaching, either in experimental or natural history
science, has been generally followed. But in most centers of education
the old traditions so far survive that the great end of scientific
culture is lost in attempting to conform even laboratory instruction to
the old academic methods of recitations and examinations. These, as
usually conducted, are simply hindrances in a course of scientific
training, because they are no tests of the only ability or acquirement
which science values, and therefore set before the student a false aim.
To point out this error, and to claim for science teaching its
appropriate methods, was one object of the writer in these essays.
It is, however, too often the case that, in following out our theories
of education, we avoid Scylla only to encounter Charybdis, and so, in
specializing our courses of laboratory instruction, there is great
danger of falling into the mechanical routine of a technical art, and
losing sight of those grand ideas and generalizations which give breadth
and dignity to scientific knowledge. That these great truths are as
important an element of scientific culture as experimental skill, the
author has also endeavored to illustrate, and he has added brief notices
of the lives of two noble men of science which may add force to the
illustrations.