THE EXTENSION IN SCIENTIFIC TEACHING. 461 



on the one hand, of primary and secondary school education, and, on 

 the other, of the conditions which are attached by the universities to 

 the attainment of their degrees and their rewards. As I ventured to 

 remark some years ago, we want a most-favored-nation clause inserted 

 in our treaty with educators. We have a right to claim that science 

 shall be put upon the same footing as any other great subject of in- 

 struction, that it shall have an equal share in the schools, an equal 

 share in the recognized qualification for degrees, and in university 

 honors and rewards. It must be recognized that science, as intel- 

 lectual discipline, is at least as valuable, and, as knowledge, is at least 

 as important, as literature, and that the scientific student must no 

 longer be handicapped by a linguistic (I will not call it literary) 

 burden, the equivalent of which is not imposed upon his classical 

 compeer. 



Let me repeat that I say this, not as a depredator of literature, but 

 in the interests of literature. The reason why our young people are 

 so often scandalously and lamentably deficient in literary knowledge, 

 and still more in the feeling and the desire for literary excellence, lies 

 in the fact that they have been withheld from a true literary training 

 by the pretense of it, which too often passes under the name of classi- 

 cal instruction. Nothing is of more importance to the man of science 

 than that he should appreciate the value of style, and the literary work 

 of the school would be of infinite value to him if it taught him this 

 one thing. But I do not believe that this is to be done by what 

 is called forming one's self on classical models, or that the advice to 

 give one's days and nights to the study of any great writer is of much 

 value. " Le style est l'homme meme," as a man of science who was a 

 master of style has profoundly said ; and aping somebody else does 

 not help one to express one's self. A good style is the vivid expression 

 of clear thinking, and it can be attained only by those who will take 

 infinite pains, in the first place, to purge their own minds of ignorance 

 and half-knowledge, and, in the second, to clothe their thoughts in the 

 words which will most fitly convey them to the minds of others. I 

 can conceive no greater help to our scientific students than that they 

 should bring to their work the habit of mind which is implied in the 

 power to write their own language in a good style. But this is exactly 

 what our present so-called literary education so often fails to confer, 

 even on those who have enjoyed its fullest advantages, while the ordi- 

 nary schoolboy has rarely been even made aware that its attainment is 

 a thing to be desired. 



