This day week, Sir James Paget delivered the annual address
to the students of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, and took as his subject" Scientific Study." He maintained that no kind of study did more to educate the power of observing, the power of accurately recording observa- tions, to teach the difficulty of attaining to a real knowledge of the truth, and to discipline the mind in forming hypotheses adequate to the explanation of the facts. He illustrated very effectively the great difficulty of observing, saying that there is hardly a year in which some new form or symptom of disease is not observed which had always been open to observation, but which had never been observed before. The habit of accuracy in recording observations depends very much, in Sir James Paget's view, on making the record while the facts are still in sight,—as an artist, for instance, must do if he is to learn how to paint Nature with any reality at all. He illustrated the difficulty of sifting the truth by the long processes which the Law Courts go through to discover whether a fraud has or has not been practised.
Previous page
