100 YEARS AGO

The Preparation of the Child for Science. A great change in the character of the books concerned with the teaching of science has taken place during the last twenty years or so. A quarter of a century ago the claims of science to a place in the school curriculum were being advocated vigorously, and men of science had still to convince reigning school-masters that no education was complete which ignored the growth of natural knowledge and failed to recognise that an acquaintance with the phenomena of nature is necessary to intelligent living. Speaking broadly, it may be said that most classicists even admit now that there are faculties of the human mind which are best developed by practice in observation and experiment. One consequence of the success which has followed the persistent efforts of Huxley and his followers – to secure in the school an adequate recognition of the educative power of science – has been that modern books on science teaching are concerned almost entirely with inquiries into the best methods of instructing young people, by means of practical exercises, how to observe accurately and to reason intelligently.

From Nature 2 February 1905.

50 YEARS AGO

Principles of Geomorphology. Geomorphology as a science has grown up in the railway age. A hint of what was coming might be espied in those eighteenth-century travellers who, like Gilpin, began very haltingly to display an interest in the form of landscape rather than its formalized versions. A hundred years later and the trains have reached Lucerne; soon we are well into the age of physiography, that pleasant ill-defined compost which made an agreeable part of the later Victorian education. A further hundred years, and this lively branch of science has given birth to a remarkable variety of new and odd words such as pediplains, steptoes and fluviraption... Progress has been rapid; yet the discussion of the characteristics, origin and development of land-forms will long continue to provide an attractive and challenging mental discipline and a valuable education. Geomorphology not only gives scope for the exploratory and cartographical type of mind but also allows abundant opportunity to increase with time the precision of measurement, examination and analysis. Probing, indeed, may gradually replace mapping in this as in other fields.

From Nature 5 February 1955.