CHAPTER VII
TEXT-BOOKS AND BOOKS OF REFERENCE
ΟNE of my dictionaries tells me that a text-book is "a book containing the leading principles of a science." Another goes into more detail and explains that a text-book is "a volume, as of some classical author, on which a teacher lectures or comments; hence any manual of instruction; a school book." You will note that we have here two fundamentally different ideas of what a text-book is, and the difference arises from the relation assumed between the book and the teacher. The first definition does not mention the teacher at all; the second puts him in the forefront.
The connexion between the teacher and the text-book is an ancient one, and carries us back to very early times when there were few books indeed. There were, in fact, more teachers than books, and the business of the teachers was to acquire as much knowledge as they could from books and from inter-course with men, and then place this knowledge at
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