著者
蔵原 三雪
出版者
日本科学史学会
雑誌
科学史研究 (ISSN:21887535)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.39, no.215, pp.144-153, 2000 (Released:2021-08-23)

W. E. Griffis (1843-1926) was an American Yatoi science teacher in early Meiji Japan. He had gotten into Rutgers College in 1865. Rutgers College added a new scientific school to become New Jersey's land-grant institution in 1865. And so Rutgers College, the classical course, reformed his curriculum. The new curriculum was called the new scientific curriculum. Because it included new modern scientific subjects. W. E. Griffis was belong to the classical course and studied classics, and new scientific subjects, chemistry and physics, there. He had been interested in chemistry which Prof. George H. Cook had taught in his laboratory. He took the Bachelor of Arts in 1869. After he had decided to be a science teacher in Japan, he took the special course of Rutgers' Scientific School for about a month in October 1870. The special course was set up in 1869. It had two instruction programs for partial students and for students to want to take "the full program." The students of the special course was able to study to do experiments in chemistry by Prof. G. H. Cook. W. E. Griffis seems to have made experiments in Blowpipe Analysis, Chemical Analysis-Qualitative, Chemical Analysis-Qualitative and Quantitative, etc as a partial students. So W. E. Griffis could teach chemistry and physics to Japanese students who had never learned modern natural sciences. The students showed deep in the new scientific subjects. Some of them had been science teachers and scientists. W. E. Griffis was a pioneer of science teachers in Japan. In this paper I want .to discuss the historical background and his modern scientific knowledge which W. E. Griffis contributed to modern Japanese education.