678 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ciate in later years. You have here an opportunity of acquiring a 

 wide general view of the whole range of scientific thought and 

 method. If you proceed to a science degree you are required to lay 

 a broad foundation of acquaintance with the physical and biological 

 sciences. You are thus brought into contact with the subjects of each 

 great department of natural knowledge, and you learn enough re- 

 garding them to enable you to understand their scope and to sympa- 

 thize with the workers who are engaged upon them. But when your 

 academical career is ended, no such chance of wide general training 

 is ever likely to be yours again. You will be dragged into the whirl 

 of life, where you will probably find little time or opportunity to 

 travel much beyond the sphere of employment to which you may 

 have been called. Make the most, therefore, of the advantages which 

 in this respect you meet with here. Try to insure that your acquaint- 

 ance with each branch of science embraced in your circle of studies 

 shall be as full and accurate as lies in your power to make it. Even 

 in departments outside the bounds of your own tastes and ultimate 

 requirements, do not neglect the means provided for your gaining 

 some knowledge of them. I urge this duty, not because its diligent 

 discharge will obviously tell in your examinations, but because it will 

 give you that scientific culture which, while enabling you to appreci- 

 ate and enjoy the successive advances of other sciences than that 

 which you may select for special cultivation, will at the same time 

 increase your general usefulness and aid you in your own researches. 



The days of Admirable Crichtons are long since past. So rapid 

 and general is the onward march of science that not only can no man 

 keep pace with it in every direction, but it has become almost hope- 

 lessly impossible to remain abreast of the progress in each of the sev- 

 eral subdivisions of even a single science. We are entering more and 

 more upon the age of specialists. It grows increasingly difficult for 

 the specialists, even in kindred sciences, to remain in touch with each 

 other. When you find yourselves fairly launched into the vortex 

 of life you will look back with infinite satisfaction to the time when 

 you were enabled to lay a broad and solid platform of general acquire- 

 ment within the walls of this college. 



Perhaps the most remarkable defect in the older or literary 

 methods of education was the neglect of the faculty of observation. 

 For the training of the other mental faculties ample provision was 

 made, but for this, one of the most important of the whole, no care 

 was taken. If a boy was naturally observant, he was left to cultivate 

 the use of his eyes as he best might; if he was not observant, nothing 

 was done to improve him in this respect, unless it were, here and 

 there, by the influence of such an intelligent teacher as is described 

 in Mrs. Barbauld's famous story of Eyes and No Eyes. Even when 



