THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY 15 



that there is room for the application of scientific principles 

 in every department of life; that the farmer, the manufacturer 

 or the merchant, no less than the engineer or the physician, must 

 prepare to avail himself of the theory which has been built up 

 by investigators, which has been taught in laboratories and in- 

 corporated in books, if he would bring his practice up to the 

 needs of the time. 



Of all the conquests of modern science, there is none which, 

 in my judgment, is more remarkable or significant than this con- 

 quest of current business opinion. We no longer draw a distinc- 

 tion between learned and unlearned professions. We have 

 recognized that every profession and every trade, in order to be 

 pursued to the best advantage, must be a learned one. None 

 so complex as to be unable to get help from science; none so 

 simple as not to need it. We have shaped our system of technical 

 training accordingly; and we have learned to rate at their true 

 worth the men and the places that can give training as research 

 institutions, side by side \vith universities which make progress 

 in such training possible. 



Equally important, though of a different and perhaps less 

 wholly satisfactory character, has been the change in the scheme 

 of our general education, in the choice of subjects and methods 

 of teaching offered in preparation for the general work of cit- 

 izenship as distinguished from the preparation of each man for 

 his business or calling. 



The old course of study in our high schools and colleges con- 

 sisted chiefly of classics, mathematics, and metaphysics, with a 

 little history and a few descriptive courses in natural science. 

 Of scientific training in the modern sense it gave none, except to 

 the unusual man whose mathematical tastes made the study of 

 algebra and analytical geometry a means of scientific education 

 in spite of text book and instructor or class room atmosphere, or 

 the still more unusual man who used his grammar and meta- 

 physics as an exercise in closely ordered reasoning. The course 

 as a whole was constructed for the man whose interests were in 

 the past rather than in the present and the future. The training 



