SCIENCE AND OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 695 



of the parts ; it demonstrates that each element in the organism lives 

 of itself, and finds in the blood the conditions required for its action. 

 Mevue des Deux Mondes. 







SCIENCE AND OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 1 

 Bt f. a. p. baknakd, ll. d., 



PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE. 



MR. PRESIDENT : I am expected to deal, this evening, with a 

 theme which, under the actual circumstances, it is somewhat 

 difficult to handle. The degree to which our systems of education 

 tend to foster or discourage original investigation into the truths of 

 Nature is a topic which might better befit an assembly more gravely 

 disposed than the present. Didce est desipere in loco it is pleasant 

 to put on the cap and bells when circumstances favor, says Horace, 

 and he says quite truly; but he does not say, difficile est sapere inter 

 pocida it is hard to imitate the solemnity of Minerva's bird, when 

 champagne is on the board, as I think he ought to have said, and as he 

 would, perhaps, have said if prosody had allowed, and which would 

 have been equally true. I shall not aim at such an imitation. I do 

 not mean to be didactic if I can help it. If I am so, I trust you will 

 be indulo-ent. 



I say, then, that our long-established and time-honored system of 

 liberal education and when I speak of the system I mean the whole 

 system, embracing not only the colleges, but the tributary schools of 

 the lower grade as well does not tend to form original investigators 

 of Nature's truths ; and the reason that it does not is, that it inverts 

 the natural order of proceeding in the business of mental culture, and 

 fails to stimulate in season the powers of observation. And when I 

 say this, I must not be charged with treason to my craft at least, 

 not with treason spoken for the first time here for I have uttered the 

 same sentiment more than once before in the solemn assemblies of the 

 craft itself. 



I suppose, Mr. President, that at a very early period of your life you 

 may have devoted, like so many other juvenile citizens, a portion of 

 your otherwise unemployed time to experiments in horticulture. In 

 planting leguminous seeds you could not have failed to observe that 

 the young plants come up with their cotyledons on their heads. If, 

 in pondering this phenomenon, you arrived at the same conclusion 

 that I did, you must have believed that Nature had made a mistake, 

 and so have pulled up your plants and replanted them upside down. 

 Men and women are but children of a larger growth. They see the 



1 Address at the Tyndall Banquet. 



