from a fraction of an inch to three feet, form sharp steps across the ground, intersecting both the till veneered ledges and the bare striated surfaces themselves. Above this shore line of 1899, in places, are distinct higher terraces and beaches which bear an older growth of forest. The uplift of September, 1899, therefore, is but the latest of a series of mountain building movements which have from time to time renewed and modified the slopes of the coastal topography. JAMES W. GOLDTHWAIT. BOOKS RECEIVED. Exercises in Zoology, by Worrallo Whitney and Frederic C. Lucas. Neeves Stationery Company, Chicago. Good Health, by Frances G. Jewett. Ginn & Co., Chicago. 172 pages. Manual of Style. University of Chicago Press. Elementary Experimental Magnetism and Electricity, a combined lecture and laboratory course by William Allanach, B.Sc. Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1906. Pp. 265. $1.20 net. (London), Plane and Solid Geometry, by Isaac Newton Failor, Principal Richmond Hill High School, New York. The Century Co., 1906. Pp. 418. Fairy Stories Retold from St. Nicholas. The Century Co., 1906. Pp. 192. The Making of an American School Teacher, by Forest Crissey. C. M. Barnes & Co., Chicago, 1906. Pp. 75. The Directory of Science and Mathematics Associations which has been printed on the first three pages of the advertising section will hereafter be printed only in the October, February and June issues. Use now the directory printed in the October number. Officers and others are requested to keep this Journal informed of any change in the officiary. NOTICE. See our Clubbing Offers in the Advertising Section CONTENTS FOR FEBRUARY, 1907. TROUBLE IN SOLID GEOMETRY—G. W. Greenwood HINTS ON GEOMETRY TEACHING-G. C. Shutts THE TRAINING OF THE INDUSTRIAL CHEMIST-W. D. Richardson A COURSE IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING FOR TEACHERS OF PHYSICS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS-George A. Cowen Association of Mathematics Teachers of New England Report of the meeting of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in the Middle States and Maryland Biology Section of the Central Association of Science and Mathematics SCHOOL SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS VOL. VII. No. 2 CHICAGO, FEBRUARY, 1907 WHOLE NO. 49 SCIENCE FOR CULTURE.* BY JOHN F. WOODHULL, PH. D., Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. If there is anything the matter with science teaching one may be very hopeful that the difficulty will be cured when he considers the number of associations and clubs of science teachers formed to discuss plans for improving present conditions. My subject needs a little definition. Probably everyone who is teaching science is attempting to cultivate something. One aims at accuracy, skill, honesty of thought, discipline; another aims to cultivate imagination, power of generalizing, information, etc. I have no disagreement with either party, except that they ought not to exist as parties. They should combine. The different departments of education should work toward one end. Certainly it cannot be the duty of one department to tear down what another constructs. It is my purpose to speak of culture as we generally use the term when we speak of culture courses, liberal education, etc. No one needs imagination more than the investigator and no one has a better opportunity to cultivate it than the teacher of physics. The scientist and the humanist have not conflicting duties indeed there is no occasion to make a distinction between them. Humanism which is not scientific and science which is not humanistic are worthless. Professor Cooke says, "Science culture differs in its methods from the old classical culture, but it has the same spirit and the same object."" Paper read at the annual meeting of the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers, University of Chicago, Nov. 30, 1906. 1 J. P. Cooke-Science Culture, p. 20. Professor Burr, speaking of the fundamental idea of the humanists, says, "It was their open purpose in which they gloried to treat of things as they actually existed, to get as near to the life of the community as the best knowledge would bring them; in other words, to touch human life intimately and at the greatest possible number of points.' 992 Let it be conceded that it is very desirable to cultivate accuracy, self-dependence, mental honesty, etc. There is no short cut -no royal road to these results. Such fruits do not come out of forty laboratory exercises. They are a slow growth of many years. Quantitative work simplified, made direct, and put in its proper sequence with qualitative work may profitably occupy, say one quarter of the effort of a high school pupil in physics. But science is something more than measurement. To be sure when men began to measure they took great strides forward, but it is equally true that research comes to a standstill when information and imagination are wanting. The chief difficulty with science teaching today, both in the high school and in the college, is that we do not give sufficient information. Culture courses, or information courses, are often spoken of scornfully as a "smattering of all the 'ologies." We have the mistaken idea that we can cut a clean swath in education; can teach a subject thoroughly; can treat a few principles and teach the whole truth about them first hand. But this is to attempt the impossible. Neither the immature nor the mature human mind works that way. Dr. Simon Newcomb says: "The plausible system of learning one thing thoroughly before proceeding to another, and taking things up in their logical order only, should be abandoned. Let us train the pupil as rapidly as possible in the higher forms of thought and not be afraid of his having a little smattering of advanced subjects before they are reached in regular course. Let us remember that thoroughness of understanding is a slow growth, in which unconscious cerebration plays an important part, and leave it to be slowly acquired. A teacher aiming at thoroughness might have kept Cayley or Sylvester working half his life cn problems of advanced arithmetic without reaching his standard of thoroughness."" 2 W. H. Burr-Science, Oct. 26, 1906. 3 Simon Newcomb, Educational Review, April, 1906. |