The pioneers of the teaching of science imagined that its introduction into education would remove the conventionality, artificiality, and backward-lookingness which were characteristic; of classical studies, but they were gravely disappointed.so,too,in their time had the humanists thought that the study of the classical authors in the original would banish at once the dull pedantry and superstition of mediaeval scholasticism the professional schoolmaster was a match for both of them, and has almost managed to make the understanding of chemical reactions as dogmatic an affair as the reading of virgil's aeneid.