PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.
85
In dealing with the forest in its present condition, we have
therefore the difficult problem, How bring it back to a natural
state ? If we leave Nature unassisted, it may be that we must
wait until caterpillars innumerable have made a desert before
Nature again provides a truly natural growth. How long will
that process take ? Is it not better to help her to get light and
air where it is wanted by the quicker process of the axe and
mattock ?
I have dwelt, perhaps, at too great length upon one of the
many problems of interest that the forest affords. May I go
further and point out that in these days, when we call out so
much for science teaching, we are in danger of overlooking the
best method of all of teaching scientific habits of thought, the
observation of Nature herself.
What do we mean by teaching science, and what do we
hope for from it ? Although a self-evident truth, it seems to
need constant repetition that what is wanted is not the acquire-
ment of facts and theories only, but of the method by which these
facts and theories are arrived at. It is not the collection of dried
specimens of other people's knowledge, but the power of finding
for ourselves, and better still, of cultivating for ourselves, that
we need.
The experience of others is no doubt of the greatest value ;
the slow growth of progress in arts and manufactures in the past
has been owing to the necessity for each step in advance to be
worked out by slow individual experience without a knowledge
of the principles to be worked on, or of the results of other's
thoughts and results. Yet the wide stores of fact and theory that
are now available to any worker are valueless unless those who
would profit by them have grasped the scientific methods of
research enough to assimilate and make them their own and
carry them out in practice.
Forty years' experience of applied science have concurred in
shewing me that in practice the man is hopelessly lost who can
not find his own way a great deal further than the best-published
results will take him. What we want is research, research,
research. I have much more hope of the child who can intelli-
gently find out for himself how to make a mud pie than of the
walking dictionary who can give an unoriginal answer to any
question that can be extracted out of a syllabus of study.