set of drawers should be of such size and shape as to accommodate the apparatus to be kept in them, and should be partitioned so as to make a place for everything.

The drawers should be provided with a series of master-keyed locks, duplicates being used on each individual set of drawers. Lockers and padlocks, high shelves, and all unnecessary projections and ornamentations should be abolished. The writer has during the past five years been looking forward to building such a laboratory adapted to highschool needs and conditions, and was recently given instructions to carry out his plans. The result has been very gratifying, and has called forth very high praise by all science teachers who have visited it.

The time given to laboratory work will vary somewhat with local conditions. In a small school double recitation periods can be devoted to this, but in larger schools this is almost impossible, owing to the difficulty in arranging the schedule. Here single periods must be the rule.

When pupils have two periods, the tendency is to lag somewhat, in the belief that there is plenty of time, and also to cause confusion and disturbance and waste of time by visiting and talking. With one period, the pupil realizes that he must make every motion count, otherwise he can accomplish nothing; and in a month or so he learns to plan his work to better advantage, learns to put all his energy into the task in hand, and soon realizes that it is a waste of time and energy to talk and visit while working. The motto in the laboratory should be work, with absolutely no communication whatever. If carried on in this way, the laboratory develops that power to do work which is so lacking in most pupils of high-school age, and teaches independence, confidence, and self-reliance—the ability to do things.

If the work is systematically laid out beforehand, and properly directed by the teacher in the laboratory, as much work can be accomplished in three single periods as in two double ones. The rest of the time should be devoted to recitation, reviews, and lecture experiments and explanations by the teacher.

Because of its wider general scope, and more universal application to our everyday life, physics came into our school system long before chemistry Of the relative value of the two, to high-school pupils it is by far the most important; and when only one can be taught, it should unhesitatingly be chosen. When both are taught, it should always precede chemistry.

Because "the study of chemistry is the key which unlocks the door into a great wealth of hitherto unknown facts, and which seems to me opens up a greater storehouse of knowledge than any study taken in the high school," it should be placed in the senior year, following physics of the previous year.

The study of chemistry in the high school, under a thoroly trained teacher, with the aid of a simple, practical, well-chosen equipment, by means of lecture experiments, laboratory work, and reviews, should develop the habit of rapid, independent, intelligent, and accurate work, should cultivate patience and self-reliance, and should open to the pupil, just as he is nearing, in the majority of cases, the end of his school days, a view of that minute, perfect, harmonious working of the Creator everywhere in the world in which he is about to take an active part.

THE TEACHING OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

S. A. FORBES, DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS Along with the existing movement to make the study of nature more natural has lately appeared an equally significant movement to make the study of science more scientific. The former movement affects especially the primary

and the elementary schools; the latter, the secondary school and the college. It is the object of the former to enlarge, to refine, and to vivify the personal experience; it is the object of the latter to organize experience into forms effective for future use. Nature study may thus be said to sow the seed from which the study of science cultivates the crop, and, in due time, reaps the harvest.

The method of assorting and generalizing the data of experience by means of which the average man is able to apply the lessons of his past to the conduct of his future is simply a crude, wasteful, and slipshod form of the method by which the data of science are organized in the process of scientific discovery. The method of science and the method of life are essentially the same, and a practical command of the scientific method is an important part of the preparation for life. This movement for the improvement of scientific instruction is thus a part of the more general movement to relate the work of the school more closely to the life of the community.

It is as yet, it must be admitted, in its initial stages, so far as its effect on the actual teaching of the average school is concerned, and it is with the hope of doing something to help it forward into practical operation that I have undertaken to discuss here, very briefly and in a general way, the method of the physical sciences, together with the modifications of that method characteristic of the several sciences, as related to the work of the teacher in the secondary school. I have chosen this topic because it has often seemed to me that the facts of the sciences, the multitude of objects with which they have to do, the varied apparatus which most of them bring into use, and the interesting mechanical processes involved in elementary science work, often exercise a kind of fascination over the science teacher, engrossing his interest too largely, to the partial neglect of the mental methods to which these facts and processes owe all their truly scientific character.

The physical sciences-chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, biology, etc.-do not agree in their methods in all respects. The method of chemistry is so different in some particulars from that of physics that one trained in chemical methods needs much more than a mere knowledge of the facts of physics to become a physicist, and no training in physics with chemical knowledge superadded will make an expert chemist. A man may never be so much a chemist or physicist or both, but he cannot then become a competent biologist by merely learning any number of facts about biology; he must still have his training in the special biological method. But notwithstanding minor diversities in the methods of the separate sciences, there are certain main features common to them all which may be abstracted, generalized, and stated in comprehensive form; and these constitute what we may call the method of science, in our sense of the term.

But what shall we mean by "method" in this discussion? Not the mere use of tools of any sort, however complicated and valuable; not the manipulation of apparatus, or any form of mechanical operation on anything. Tools,

apparatus, and laboratory manipulations and experiments are helps to observation, indispensable often in the accumulation of facts, but they do not in the least help to organize the facts accumulated, or to reason on them when organized. The method of even physical science is indeed a mental method, and the study of this method is a study of the action of the scientific mind while engaged in the pursuit of scientific truth. The subject is thus not physical, but psychological, and the first question which we wish to find an answer for is: What are the general features of mental method common to all sound and successful investigations in the physical, or concrete, sciences? What are the steps or stages in the method of the scientific man engaged in the serious study of a new, difficult, and complicated problem.

Time is wanting for an analysis of details, and I must content myself with saying that the accumulation of observations pertinent to the subject in hand or the end in view, the classification and generalization of these observations, the framing hypotheses as to causes, explanations, and the like, from the materials thus obtained, deduction from these hypotheses, and comparison of the products of these deductions in every way possible with new facts till substantial certainty is reached--these are the general steps of the method of physical science. In practice, however, and in some of the sciences, this whole round is rarely followed out in full. Short-cuts across corners, abbreviations, or even omissions of certain steps of the process are often possible to the expert, who may see, as by a flash of judgment, whither an investigation is tending, and so jump to the point at once.

In physics or in chemistry a single observation or experiment is sometimes enough to suggest a hypothetic explanation which brings the experimenter at once to the verification stage of his inquiry. In many departments of science vast masses of material have already been accumulated, classified, and generalized in advance, ready for the use of anyone; and investigation in these departments may begin with imagined hypotheses, followed by verification thru experiment and by added observation. In mathematics especially induction was long ago practically completed, and the mathematician is occupied now only with deductive and verification processes. Physics and chemistry also have gone some distance on the same road, and general laws have been established in considerable number and of extensive scope, from which deductions may be made at once, and by reference to which new facts may be explained without the tedious preliminaries of extensive observation and repeated generalization. In the vast field of biology, on the other hand, full as it is of the most perplexing complications, few stable generalizations have as yet been reached, and there most students are still busy with the inductive side of the operation. They are working toward general propositions, while the mathematicians and physicists are working from them. Induction predominates, in short, in the more complicated-that is, the less developed--sciences, and the deductive method in those which are far advanced.

It is one of the features of the scientific method in biology that we are

obliged to depend largely on mere hypotheses, which cannot be strictly verified by crucial experiments, but which commend themselves to us merely because they accord with all known facts. If all the facts were completely known to us, such a hypothesis would, of course, be fully established as the final truth, but as the mass of pertinent facts is almost never wholly known, and as the appearance of one inconsistent fact would overthrow it, many biological theories must always be held subject to revision or abandonment.

The appreciation of these differences of method in the various related sciences is of great practical importance, since it is not an uncommon error to apply the method of one science in the field of another to which it is not appropriate. One trained mainly in chemistry, accustomed to infer with certainty the characters of a whole class from the results of an examination of his first example of it, knows little of the tedious repetitions of observation on multitudes of individuals and the complicated processes of generalization necessary to establish class characters in zoology or botany; and the mathematician, accustomed to go at once to his general principles as an unalterable point of departure, can scarcely appreciate the requirements of an investigator who must start from individual instances, with general principles as the halfway house to his goal.

These various steps and phases of the scientific method are all processes of which we make almost constant use, in some crude and simple form at least, in nearly all our thinking and in most of our intelligent active life. We begin to discriminate, to classify, to generalize, and to infer long before we have learned to read, and we never outgrow the necessity for the constant use of these intellectual processes until we cease thinking and acting altogether. Upon the thoroness of our command and the correctness of our use of them depend much of our happiness and most of our success, and a course of school training which does not take them into practical account is evidently deficient in an important element of that preparation for life which is the end of training. and the object of the school.

Huxley taught that science is nothing but trained and organized commonsense, and the question, therefore, whether the scientific method should be deliberately used in science-teaching is a question whether common-sense should be deliberately organized and trained, or whether the ordinary man may be safely left to train and organize his common-sense himself. Now, I think that it is unquestionable that if the scientist needs to be trained in the scientific method, as so defined, for the fit performance of his labors as a scientific man, then the ordinary citizen needs it very much more for the fittest living of his ordinary life. The art of right and rational living is the most difficult of all the arts, and the most complicated and perplexing of all the sciences are those which underlie that art. The task of the investigating chemist in his laboratory, or of the botanist in the field, is simple indeed as compared with the bewildering difficulties which beset the father of a family, the citizen of a community, the voter in a democracy, the physician in charge

of the health and lives of hundreds of his fellow-men, the business man, whose transactions reach to the ends of the earth, and are inextricably entangled in every direction with the affairs of thousands of others, over whom he has little or no control.

We solve the great problems of practical life by the reference of particular cases, as they arise, to established and accepted general principles; by reference of them to ready-made generalizations drawn from our own experience; or by new judgments based on our general knowledge and on our previous acquaintance with similar instances; and hence we need for their solution not only a store of applicable general principles and much practice in their application, but the power and the habit also of generalizing our own experience. accurately and holding the results tenaciously, and the habit of revising general notions freely in the light of new occasions. We need, that is to say, a thoro comprehension and a practical command of that method of assembling, organizing, and rationalizing facts of all orders which in scientific matters we call the scientific method. An example or two from practical life will illustrate.

In an ordinary minor medical experience there is involved a determination process; the assignment, that is, of a case of llness to its proper place in the classification of diseases, or the recognition of a pathological state by means of the visible and tangible characters which it presents, and the use of such remedial measures as have been associated in the physician's knowledge with this disease or condition. In more difficult or unusual cases there is a more definite reasoning from effect to cause, as the physician studies the various indications of physical disturbance presented by the patient and infers from them the precise nature of the existing disorder; and reasoning from cause to effect, as when the history of a case is analyzed and a selection is made from the various items of this history of those which there is reason to believe are causally connected with the disordered condition. A double hypothesis is thus framed, and upon it a program of treatment is based, involving the application of remedies and the removal of such causes as remain. This treatment is in the nature of a verification process covering the whole series of observations, and the course of reasoning following thereupon.

I well remember the discussion, in my presence, of a case in which I was deeply interested, by a friend and eminent physician, who was good enough to do his thinking aloud as he debated with himself concerning the cause of a group of rather puzzling symptoms in the case before him, and it would be difficult to devise a neater illustration of the practical use of the logical method of residues. Reviewing the list of conceivable causes of the observed effects, but eliminating them one by one because if existent they would have been attended by other symptoms not present in this case, he finally had but one possible cause remaining, and upon this conclusion he based his treatment for its removal. He framed a hypothesis, that is, which was finally verified completely by the outcome of his treatment. The whole scientific process was