Turn now to another aspect of the zoologist's work--that of teaching. We
should think it very wrong to turn men loose on the world to practise in
the professions of law or medicine without a long and careful training
to fit them for their task. No less impossible is it for anyone to
become a man of science without a similar training; for the profession
of the man of science, whether zoologist, chemist, botanist, or expert
in whatever branch, if defined in plain English, is the profession of
seeking after knowledge of the order of things in which we live; and
what profession can be more important to the world than this? To attain
a scientific degree of any value, years of study are therefore required,
and a series of examinations tests--or is supposed to test--the success
of the student. Both the work of teaching and the work of examining must
be the tasks of the scientist who has attained a position of eminence
in the world of learning. The preparation of lectures, with their
accompanying illustrations of diagrams and lantern slides: the guiding
of classes engaged in the actual work of making acquaintance with animal
specimens--these are the labours of the great man who is at the head of
things. His task is carried out with the aid of junior helpers of his
own profession--the demonstrators, who "point out" detail after detail
of the work described in the lectures. Another helper, more esteemed by
the students than by the professor who teaches them, is the "coach" who
prepares them directly for their examinations. His aid, in the shape of
extra teaching, given at the last moment, will often secure for the
careless and inattentive pupil, better success than is the lot of the
painstaking and industrious one, who cannot afford to pay extra fees.
Few, however, of all the many pupils who crowd the lecture room of the
zoologist, will ever become zoologists themselves. A vast proportion of
them are students of medicine, of whom some knowledge of the subject is
required. Others are preparing to be schoolmasters or schoolmistresses,
and seek just such an amount of knowledge as they expect to find useful
in teaching pupils of their own. To the students who are preparing to be
doctors or teachers, circumstances often assign a limit--"thus far and
no farther"--when they would fain bring their knowledge to a higher
standard. But the time they have spent already has not been wasted. How
keen an observer of animal life is the country doctor! How often,
isolated from the world of learning, and ill-provided with books, he
finds in this his chief recreation! As for the schoolmaster, how is the
routine of school-work relaxed, and labour changed into pleasure, when
he lets his boys exchange grammar and Euclid for zoology, and the
lessons of the schoolroom for lessons in the fields!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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