Physics

When a pupil begins the study of Physics he has in his possession many bits of knowledge which are fundamental in the science. He has learned to throw a ball and can tell how a thrown ball moves. He has drawn out nails with a claw hammer. He has seen wood float and iron sink. He has sucked liquids up through straws. In his mother's kitchen, he sees water as ice, liquid, and steam. On a wintry day he reads the temperature on a thermometer. He sees sparks fly from car wheels when the brakes are applied. He has played with a horseshoe magnet, and has found the north by means of a compass. The telephone, the electric light and the motor he sees, and perhaps uses, many times a day. He dresses before a mirror, focuses his camera, watches the images at a moving picture show, and admires the colors of the rainbow. He has cast stones into water to watch the ripples spread, has shouted to hear the echo, and perhaps plays some musical instrument. These, and a thousand other things, are known to the intelligent and normal boy or girl who has reached the age at which the study of Physics is properly begun.

To a great extent even the terms used in the science are familiar to the beginner. He speaks of the horse-power of an engine, reads kilowatt-hours from the meter in the cellar, and may know that illuminating gas costs one dollar per thousand "cubic feet." "Ampere" and "volt" are words he frequently hears and sees.

When he takes up the study of Physics, the attitude of the student toward these familiar things and words must undergo a change. Casual information about them must be changed to sound knowledge, purposely acquired. Hazy notions about the meanings of words must be replaced by exact definitions. Bits of knowledge must be built into a structure in which each fact finds its proper place in relation to the others.

The only agent which can accomplish these changes is the student himself. He must consciously and purposely seek the truth and must reflect upon it until he sees it in its relation to other truth. Upon him, and upon him alone, rests the final responsibility for the success or failure of his study.

But the student is not without assistance. In his teacher he finds a guide to stimulate, to direct, and to aid his efforts, and a critic to point out wherein his efforts have failed and wherein they have succeeded. Weights, measures, and other apparatus are furnished to enable him to answer for himself questions which have arisen in his studies.

In addition to these the student has his text book, his teacher for his hours of private study. A good text book is an inspiring teacher in print. It directs attention to things familiar to the student through long experience, and inspires him to make a closer scrutiny of them. It invites him to observe, to analyze, to compare, to discover likenesses and differences in behavior. It questions him at every turn. Its ever repeated challenge reads, "Weigh and consider." It furnishes him needed information that he cannot otherwise acquire. It satisfies his desire to know, "By whom, where, when, and how was this first discovered?"

The student of Physics must never forget that he is studying not pages of text but the behavior and properties of iron, water, mica, moving balls, pumps, boiling liquids, compressed air, mirrors, steam engines, magnets, dynamos, violins, flutes, and a host of other things. His studies should, whenever possible, be made first hand upon the things themselves. The text is an aid to study, never a substitute for the thing studied.

It is an excellent plan for each student to select some one thing for special study, the telephone for example. By observation, experiment, and reading, he may acquire a large amount of valuable information about such a subject while pursuing his course in Physics. Every part of the science will be found to bear some relation to it.

The student who takes up the study of Physics in the way suggested will find himself at the end of a year of study in possession of much new and valuable knowledge about the physical world in which he lives. By virtue of this knowledge he will be better able to enjoy the world, to control it, and to use it.

THOMAS D. COPE.

PHILADELPHIA.