You cannot properly learn the facts you want from Anatomy and
Chemistry in any way so easily as by taking them in their regular order,
with other allied facts, only there must be common sense exercised in
leaving out a great deal which belongs to each of the two branches as
pure science. The dullest of teachers is the one who does not know what
to omit.
The larger aim of scientific training is to furnish you with principles
to which you will be able to refer isolated facts, and so bring these
within the range of recorded experience. See what the "London Times"
said about the three Germans who cracked open John Bull Chatwood's
strong-box at the Fair the other day, while the three Englishmen hammered
away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented
brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The
Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"--science, which
would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two
hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times"
attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of
the Continent.
Granting all this, we must not expect too much from "science" as
distinguished from common experience. There are ten thousand
experimenters without special apparatus for every one in the laboratory.
Accident is the great chemist and toxicologist.
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