Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
organisation of all those great divisions of the animal and vegetable
kingdoms to which the forms I have mentioned severally belong. And it
then becomes possible for him to read with profit; because every time
he meets with the name of a structure, he has a definite image in his
mind of what the name means in the particular creature he is reading
about, and therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere
repetition of words; but every term employed in the description, we
will say, of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image of the
things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a distinct
conception of that which he has not seen, as a modification of that
which he has seen.
I find this system to yield excellent results; and I have no hesitation
whatever in saying, that any one who has gone through such a course,
attentively, is in a better position to form a conception of the great
truths of Biology, especially of morphology (which is what we chiefly
deal with), than if he had merely read all the books on that topic put
together.
The connection of this discourse with the Loan Collection of Scientific
Apparatus arises out of the exhibition in that collection of certain
aids to our laboratory work. Such of you as have visited that very
interesting collection may have noticed a series of diagrams and of
preparations illustrating the structure of a frog. Those diagrams and
preparations have been made for the use of the students in the
biological laboratory. Similar diagrams and preparations illustrating
the structure of all the other forms of life we examine, are either
made or in course of preparation. Thus the student has before him,
first, a picture of the structure he ought to see; secondly, the
structure itself worked out; and if with these aids, and such needful
explanations and practical hints as a demonstrator can supply, he
cannot make out the facts for himself in the materials supplied to him,
he had better take to some other pursuit than that of biological
science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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