640 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.- 



or Semitic electricity, or Roman magnetism ; it bids any and every 

 people welcome that will promote science and lend it help. 



When we remember that the natural sciences began only about a 

 century ago to strive for a place in the state ; that before that date 

 they had been nothing more than the private affair of exceptional 

 minds ; that for the first half of our century even they played ab- 

 solutely no part in public education, but only ran a tolerated sub- 

 course with it in the universities, and were utterly unnoticed both in 

 the lower schools and in special seminaries ; that in my younger days 

 a man might be regarded as cultivated without having the faintest 

 notion of any natural science whatever ; and that it was made a re- 

 proach to men like Goethe that they took any interest in the sciences, 

 and showed an active concern about them when we think of all this, 

 and compare with it the circumstances of our day, and the tendencies 

 of our times, we understand at once why those authorities who would 

 step backward into bygone ages prefer so-called classical education 

 and favor all the influences that have clung to it since medijeval days 

 why they would restore to the word that authority which is claimed 

 to-day by the fact, and why those who are still paddling about in that 

 cultivation, handed down to us from the middle ages, seize on every 

 straw they fancy able to keep them above water. An instinct tells 

 these half -taught noodles that the ground is slipping away from them ; 

 that a day is rapidly drawing near when those branches of knowledge, 

 which they assert as of universal need for every man who claims to be 

 cultivated, shall be worthless except as specialities ; when only one here 

 and there will trouble himself about whether some crowned cowherd 

 marched with his mates on a plundering slave-hunt, as in Homer's 

 times ; and when the knowledge of Nature and her laws must come to 

 the front as always indispensable to a liberal education. Just as that 

 man, a century or so ago, was looked on as wholly neglected and un- 

 educated who had not toiled at his school-desk over the scanning of 

 Latin verses, so will people no long time hence be surprised at the 

 careless lack of training: in that man who has not mastered the 

 mechanism of the telegraph or the laws of heat long before he takes 

 his way to the university. 



" My good man," wrote a Hessian landgrave at the beginning of 

 the last century to his postmaster, who had cudgeled a royal mes- 

 senger " my good man, we have heard with the highest displeasure 

 the steps you have presumed on in your inborn coarseness and clown- 

 ishness." I don't know whether the Landgrave laid great stress on 

 the word " inborn," but he certainly used it with the feeling that the 

 case was one of inherited peculiarity. Now, in that day classical edu- 

 cation held sole and undisputed rule ; could it have pushed back 

 heredity and stifled it by nobler growths ? 



Most surely not ; and what classical training could not avail to do 

 in centuries when it held sole sway, it is still more powerless to effect 



