The Elements of Physics: A Text-Book for High Schools and Academies (Classic Reprint)

Seventeen years ago, in the preface to the first edition of this work, the author urged the importance of experiments to be performed by the pupil, as an aid to his mastery of the science of Physics, in opposition to the then universal and exclusive text-book-memorizing or illustrated-lecture system. In these seventeen years he has seen the value of the objective method of study demonstrated in the case of more than two thousand pupils in his own classes, and has witnessed the spread of the laboratory method of teaching science through the larger portion of the high schools of the United States. But with this great improvement in educational method, he has observed the development of a tendency which threatens seriously to impair its usefulness. This is the tendency to allow enthusiasm for experimentation, for mere manipulation of apparatus, to obscure the importance of an intellectual mastery of the facts and their underlying principles. In jheir zeal for training the mental powers of their pupils, teachers may easily reduce the study of physical science to a mere gymnastic forgetting that the object of training the mind is to render possible the greater acquisition of knowledge. I f, then, the pupil has not at the end of his course a reasonably comprehensive and accurate grasp of the subject-matter of Physics, the instructor may be sure that he has failed to preserve a due proportion between study and experiment.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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