unnecessary. The additional clerical work involved in the keeping of the two sets of names of borrowers and guarantors of borrowers, together with the labor necessitated by looking them up in directories and elsewhere, will cost more, save in very exceptional cases, than will the books which may be lost through the adoption of extreme liberality in the issuing of borrowers' cards. The people's money in this part of its library's administration, as in every other, should be spent rather in extending and making more easily accessible to the average citizen the library's resources than in setting barriers of red tape between the books and the people who own them and wish to use them.
| SCIENCE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATION. |
By M. P. E. M. BERTHELOT.
THE part performed by science in the general education of the human mind and the progress of civilization has been often misconceived by pedagogues, hedged in as they are by the traditional formulas of classical teaching. I recollect having heard a conversation some twenty-five years ago between Duruy, then Minister of Public Instruction, and a general school inspector, in which Duruy spoke of the importance of the experimental sciences and the necessity of giving them a larger place in the school course. The inspector, proof against general ideas, and despising utilitarian results, the importance of which he could not comprehend, saw nothing in this but a kitchen school, good at most to teach future dealers in petroleum and coal. It would not be hard to find similar opinions among some of the blind partisans of classical instruction founded on the study of Greek and Latin.
Yet, if the material conditions of human life have been changed—if the accumulation of capital and the increase of the productive force of man's labor have gradually added to the general ease and given workmen a relative independence and rights which they did not formerly possess, and which are extending every day for the good of the race—such advance, we should never cease to recollect, is not due to literary studies or scholastic or religious or philosophical discussions, but is attributable essentially to the growth of science and to the increase of general wealth brought about by it.
This immense development of wealth and industry, as well as the correlative development of the liberal and democratic spirit, are due, we declare loudly, to the discoveries of modern science. If the supply of food at the disposal of the human species goes on
