Does any one think that the Bishop's slip was in
fact due to want of scientific teaching at Marlborough? His chances of
knowing about Sir Isaac Newton, etc., etc., have been as good as those
of many familiar with the accepted version. I would rather suppose
that such sublunary problems had not interested him in the least, and
that he no more cared how we happen to stick on the earth's surface
than St Paul cared how a grain of wheat or any other seed germinates
beneath it, when he similarly was betrayed into an unfortunate
illustration.
So too on the famous occasion--always cited in these debates--when a
Home Secretary defended the Government for having permitted the
importation of fats into Germany on the ground that the discovery that
glycerine could be made from fat was a recent advance in chemistry, he
was not showing the defects of a literary education so much as a want
of interest in the problems of nature, and the subject-matter of
science at large. It is to be presumed indeed that neither fats, nor
glycerine, nor the dependent problem how living bodies are related to
the world they inhabit, had ever before seemed to him interesting. Nor
can we suppose they would, even if chemistry were substituted for
Greek in Responsions.
The difficulty in obtaining full recognition for science lies deeper
than this. It is a part of public opinion or taste which may well
survive changes in the educational system.
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