512 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lectual food on the table at once, and tlie hungry rush in and help 

 themselves to whatever is within their reach, and come away at 

 least self-satisfied. The few minds that are synthetic either by 

 nature or early training are those that reap the highest good ; the 

 rest have at most sharpened their wits or gained a pert self-esteem, 

 while many are unfitted for a life of action. 



Ingersoll's brilliant sentence in his Lincoln lecture has not a 

 little truth in it : " Colleges are places where pebbles are polished 

 but diamonds are dimmed." The truth that lies in this sentence 

 will be true so long as colleges remain a series of parthenogenetic 

 scholasticisms unfit to cope with the hard environment in which 

 mankind must live. 



Our higher schools have in the past had to deal with only a 

 limited and favored portion of mankind, but with each succeed- 

 ing generation of students they have had to go down deeper 

 among the producing people, and at each succeeding stage they 

 have more or less closely reflected the general average of those 

 with whom they dealt. People, colleges, and civilization have all 

 evolved together, pari passu. Just now all are in a state of 

 transition. In the colleges even scholasticism is slowly giving 

 way before the assaults of exact knowledge. One is encouraged 

 at seeing the rapid increase of laboratories, and the lengthening 

 courses in English and economics, and the diminishing proportion 

 of time devoted to the classics. Would that one might say the 

 same of speculative philosophy ! Its value as now studied, save 

 as an exercise in mental gymnastics, was aptly characterized by 

 one of the best- known professors of philosophy in this country, 

 when he said to me, " Philosophy is wind, and he that can sell his 

 wind at the highest figure is the greatest philosopher." 



The history of the growth of philosophic thought, studied as a 

 branch of anthropology, is of value, as the history of the slow 

 growth in any other department of human thought or effort is 

 valuable no more. 



The real value of anthropology, then, as a university study is 

 to take the place that philosophy occupied in the old scholastic 

 system, save that synthetic philosophy, under whatever name, re- 

 quires a broad basis of accurate knowledge. He that would teach 

 must have a mind of largest grasp, capable of far-reaching 

 generalizations, rigidly ruled by absolute fact. To this end pre- 

 liminary training in exact investigation is indispensable, that he 

 may be familiar with the road to truth and readily detect the 

 verified from the speculative. On the other hand, he must not be 

 a mere delver for facts. Men who are justly noted as investi- 

 gators are constantly proving themselves unfit for generalized 

 deductions even in their own departments. The teacher of an- 

 thropology must be accurately acquainted with results in astron- 



