You are a body interested in education, and in asking me, a biologist, to deliver this Presidential Address, I suppose it is your wish that I should speak of the problems of education as they look in the light of biological knowledge.

Like so many other things education in the active has aspects different from those it has in the passive. My own direct acquaintance with the subject is mostly of the passive kind. I underwent the treatment in its most drastic form. I have given a little of it, though not much: but having lived most of my life in Cambridge I have been in constant association with teachers and the taught. I have been continually in what is called an educational atmosphere—so I have watched an enormous number of cases. To speak still in the language of metaphor the majority of those cases have not recovered. I don't mean that they have actually perished or sunk into permanent mental disablement—though even that is true of a considerable number—but from the treatment provided for them at vast expense they have got very little, and I am sure they would have done about as well had they never undergone the process.