Some debatable questions and how to solve them / by Sampson Gamgee.

  • Sampson Gamgee
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some debatable questions and how to solve them / by Sampson Gamgee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    problems, scientific or social, of abstract or applied mathematics, of moral or of physical science, time and patience are no less essential than zeal. Contemplating with admiration, as everyone must, the vigorous activity of modern life, the fear now and then suggests itself that a little more patience, a more graduated pressure, a more evenly regulated speed, would be conducive to progress with less risk and friction, more happiness and comfort to the individual, more safety and honour to the State, especially so in that vast debatable question—Education. It is impossible to contemplate without anxiety the forcing system in vogue, for bringing children of tender age up to a certain fixed standard of instruction. The attempt to cram all their minds with the same kind and amount of information in a given period, would almost seem to be based on the assumption that the process was a mechanical one, of filling heads, like measures of a given cubical capacity, in a given time— “So by false learning is good sense defaced: Some are bewildered in the maze of schools, And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools.” To feed the mind as the body, food should be suited to the individual, and supplied in such quantities as to be capable of digestion and assimilation. In the process of bodily or mental i nutrition, it is not only the filling of an empty stomach, or an empty head, that is to be aimed at; but the development and training of the powers of thought and movement, so as to increase their initial force, and methodise and utilise their application, without jerk, rupture, or exhaustion. Man is an animal of slow growth. The ends of his thigh bones at eighteen years of age are separable from the shaft, as are those of a spring chicken at three months. The human spine in all its parts is not consolidated and complete, until a man is five-and- twenty years of age. The process of physical evolution and consolidation is gradual and continuous ; and to pretend prematurely to force mental growth and culture, is to go in face of the laws of nature. On this question the consensus of medical
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