The country is demanding--and rightly--a stronger bias in our educational system for teaching of a scientific kind; but teachers and professors are not unnaturally perplexed. They see the immeasurable scope of the new knowledge; they know the labour, often ineffective, that has been expended in teaching the rudiments of the old 'humanities'. And now a task is propounded to them before which the old one with all its faults seems definite, manageable and formative of character. The classical world which has been the staple of our education for 400 years is a finished thing and we can compass it in thought. It lives indeed, but unconsciously, in our lives, as we go about our business. This new world into which our youth has now to enter, rests also on the past, but it is still more present; it grows all round us faster than we can keep pace with its earlier stages. How then can such a thing be used as an instrument of education where above all something is needed of clear and definite purpose, stimulating in itself and tending to mental growth and activity in after life? We could not, even if we would, offer any satisfactory answer here to one of the most troubled questions of the day. Decades of experiments will be needed before even a tolerable solution can be reached. But the argument pursued in this and other essays may suggest a line of approach. This must lie in a reconciliation between science and history, or rather in the recognition that science rightly understood is the key to history, and that the history best worth study is the record of man's collective thought in face of the infinite complexities, the barriers and byways, the lights and shadows of life and nature. From the study of man's approach to knowledge and unity in history each new-coming student may shape his own. He sees a unity of thought not wholly unattainable, a foundation laid beneath the storms of time. To a mind thus trained should come an eagerness to carry on the conquests of the past and to apply the lessons gained to the amelioration of the present. This we may hope from the well-disposed. But for all, the contemplation of a universe where man's mind has worked for ages in unravelling its secrets and describing its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as well as trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which we turn and would have others turn, but a world as bright and splendid as the rainbow to the savage or the forest to the poet or the heavens to the lonely watcher on the Babylonian plain. The glories and the depths remain, deeper and more glorious, with all the added marvels of man's exploring thought. The seeing eye which a true education will one day give us, may read man's history in the world we live in, and read the world with the full illumination of a united human vision--the eyes of us all. BOOKS FOR REFERENCE Alcan, _De la methode dans les Sciences_. Mach, _History of Mechanics_, Kegan Paul. Thomson, _Science of Life_, Blackie.