PROGRESS OF HIGHER SCIENCE-TEACHING. 679 



lege, A. D. 166T, physics and mathematics have had their full and 

 abundant share in the curriculum of this university. If, therefore, 

 there has been a greater leaning toward physics and applied, as dis- 

 tinguished from pure mathematics, it has been accomplished, almost 

 unperceived, under the guidance of men like Stokes, Thomson, Clerk- 

 Maxwell, and his successor, Lord Rayleigh, who combine the highest 

 powers of numerical analysis with the imaginative, constructive, and 

 inventive faculty of Wheatstone and Faraday. 



At the sister University of Oxford the case is very different. Here 

 the method of the schoolmen and the misrepresented teaching of Aris- 

 totle reigned supreme until our own time. The anachronism was in- 

 deed expressed in concrete form by a single word. The "science" 

 which up to 1852 formed one foot of the tripod, with scholarship and 

 history, on which honors were adjudged, was the science of a thousand 

 years before, the metaphysics and moral philosophy of the Stoics of 

 those who, proposing to teach it, wrote over the entrance to their 

 school, ovSek; dyeofierpTjrog etairo, which, in the terms we are now 

 using, may fairly be translated, " Let none unacquainted with physics 

 enter." It was a purely mental analysis of the great problems even 

 then seen to underlie our simplest conceptions of the universe. The 

 change required in this center of learning was therefore from meta- 

 physics to physics ; it was a scientific putting of the cart before the 

 horse ; a substitution of Pythagoras or Archimedes for Plato or Aris- 

 totle, as the latter then and there were studied ; namely, in his dog- 

 matic treatises on ethics, politics, rhetoric, and metaphysics, and not 

 in his far stronger genius as a natural historian and zoologist. 



Is it to be wondered that the wrench thus suddenly given produced 

 molecular change ; that the impulse overran the neutral point ; and 

 that those who previously had been commended for accurate knowl- 

 edge of the metaphysical attributes of God should require time to 

 learn the internal economy of a Holothurian, the exact chemical con- 

 stitution of ethylic-diethyloxamate, or the formula for Carnot's revers- 

 ible heat-engine ? Even now, within an ace of thirty years from this 

 intellectual cataclysm, poor old Oxford is only just recovering from a 

 .protracted state of vertigo, and settling down again to useful work. 

 It is sad that she should have to chronicle the early loss of one who 

 has been a main agent in the revolution. The Linacre Professor of 

 Physiology [Dr. Rolleston], who began as an orthodox first-classman 

 in the school of Litterce Humaniores in 1850, dies in 1881 at the age 

 of fifty-two, an advanced exponent of modern views in anthropology. 

 Popular Science Review. 



