a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not
believe that it is other than a very valuable possession, however
infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is
dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

If William Harvey's life-long labours had revealed to him a tenth part
of that which may be made sound and real knowledge to our boys and
girls, he would not only have been what he was, the greatest
physiologist of his age, but he would have loomed upon the seventeenth
century as a sort of intellectual portent. Our "little knowledge" would
have been to him a great, astounding, unlooked-for vision of scientific
truth.

I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little
knowledge of physiology. But then, as I have said, the instruction must
be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams
and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been
acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal
parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching.

It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to give a formal contradiction to the
silly fiction, which is assiduously circulated by fanatics who not only
ought to know, but do know, that their assertions are untrue, that I
have advocated the introduction of that experimental discipline which
is absolutely indispensable to the professed physiologist, into
elementary teaching.

But while I should object to any experimentation which can justly be
called painful, for the purpose of elementary instruction; and, while,
as a member of a late Royal Commission, I gladly did my best to prevent