"THE GREEK QUESTION." 



5 



expectation is to affiliate the college with a wholly different class of 

 schools, which will send us a wholly different class of students, with 

 wholly different aims, and trained according to a wholly different 

 method. At the outset we shall look to the best of our New Eng- 

 land high-schools for a limited supply of scientific students, and hope 

 by constant pressure to improve the methods of teaching in these 

 schools, as our literary colleagues have within ten years vastly im- 

 proved the methods in the classical schools. In time we hope to bring 

 about the establishment of special academies which will do for science- 

 culture what Exeter and St. Paul's are doing for classical culture. We 

 expect to establish a set of requisitions just as difficult as the classical 

 requisitions only they will be requisitions which have a different mo- 

 tive, a different spirit, and a different aim ; and all we ask is, that they 

 should be regarded as the equivalents of the classical requisitions so 

 far as college standing is concerned. "We do not at once expect to 

 draw many students through these new channels. To improve meth- 

 ods of teaching and build up new schools is a work of years. But 

 we have the greatest confidence that in time we shall thus be able 

 to increase very greatly both the clientage and the usefulness of the 

 university. 



Is this heresy ? Is this revolution ? Is it not rather the scientific 

 method seeking to work out the best results in education as elsewhere 

 by careful observation and cautious experimenting, unterrified by au- 

 thority or superstition ? Certainly, the philologist must respect our 

 method ; for of all the conquests of natural science none is more re- 

 markable than its conquest of the philologists themselves. They have 

 adopted the scientific methods as well as the scientific spirit of inves- 

 tigation ; but, while thus widening and classifying their knowledge, 

 they have rendered the critical study of language more abstruse and 

 more difficult ; and this is the chief reason why the time of prepara- 

 tion for our college has been so greatly extended during the last twenty- 

 five years. Nominally, the classical schools cover no more ground than 

 formerly, but they cultivate that ground in a vastly more thorough and 

 scientific way. 



These increased requirements of modern literary culture suggest 

 another consideration, which we can barely mention on this occasion. 

 How long will the condition of our new country permit its youths to 

 remain in pupilage until the age of twenty-three or twenty-four ; on 

 an average at least three years later than in any of the older countries 

 of the civilized world ? It is all very well that every educated man 

 should have a certain acquaintance with what have been called the 

 " humanities." But when your system comes to its present results, 

 and demands of the physician, the chemist, and the engineer whose 

 birthright is a certain social status, which by accident you tempo- 

 rarily control that he shall pass fully four years of the training period 

 of his life upon technicalities, which, however important to a literary 



