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An Easy Grammar of Natural and Experimental Philosophy
An Easy Grammar of Natural and Experimental Philosophy Author:Richard Phillips Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. THE Author of the following pages is aware that there already exist several valuable books on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, and he should not ... more »have presumed to add to their number, except for the purpose of reducing so important a branch of knowledge to the level of the business of schools. Every instructor of youth must be aware that mere disquisition is of no use in the art of teaching, and that no science can be taught, if the student does not "work or perform operations in it. A grown person might read all the books which exist relative to any Science, and yet remain totally ignorant of its principles, and be as unable to apply them, or reason about them, if he did not patiently commit to memory its axioms, definitions, and leading divisions, and if he did not apply these himself to the practice of the science in which he is desirous to become a proficient. He who only reads about a science can be nothing more than a smatterer, while he who commits its terms and elementary principles to memory, and applies them by his own act to the various combina- ' ' , tions of the science, soon becomes a master of it. Such being the case with persons of mature age, how is it to be expected that young persons, who seldom learn any thing by force of reasoning, and who acquire knowledge only by mechanical means, should become proficients, except by committing the elementary principles of a science to memory, and exercising themselves in its practice ? In strict conformity with this feeling, the Grammar of Natural Philosophy has been compiled. All the definitions and elementary principles have been written with a studied brevity so that they may be learnt by rote. With these have been intermixed such easy and familiar Experiments and Illustrations, as enable...« less