73 8 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a hundred years hence there will only be a few eccentrics reading let- 

 ters, and almost every one will be studying the natural sciences the 

 " Times," instead of counseling Mr. Bright's young people rather to 

 drink deep of Homer, is for giving them, above all, " the works of 

 Darwin and Lyell and Bell and Huxley," and for nourishing them 

 upon the voyage of the Challenger. Stranger still, a brilliant man 

 of letters in France, M. Renan, assigns the same date of a hundred 

 years hence as the date by which the historical and critical studies, 

 in which his life has been passed and his reputation made, will have 

 fallen into neglect, and deservedly so fallen. It is the regret of his 

 life, M. Renan tells us, that he did not himself originally pursue the 

 natural sciences, in which he might have forestalled Darwin in his 

 discoveries. 



What does it avail, in presence of all this, that we find one of your 

 own prophets, Bishop Thirlwall, telling his brother who was sending 

 a son to be educated abroad that he might be out of the way of Latin 

 and Greek, "I do not think that the most perfect knowledge of every 

 language now spoken under the sun could compensate for the want of 

 them " ? What does it avail, even, that an august lover of science, 

 the great Goethe, should have said, " I wish all success to those who 

 are for preserving to the literature of Greece and Rome its predomi- 

 nant place in education " ? Goethe was a wise man, but the irresistible 

 current of things was not then manifest as it is now. "No wisdom, 

 nor counsel, nor understanding, against the Eternal ! " 



But to resign one's self too passively to supposed designs of the 

 Eternal is fatalism. Perhaps they are not really designs of the Eternal 

 at all, but designs let us for example say of Mr. Herbert Spencer. 

 Still the design of abasing what is called " mere literary instruction 

 and education," and of exalting what is called "sound, extensive, and 

 practical scientific knowledge," is a very positive design and makes 

 great progress. The universities are by no means outside its scope. 

 At the recent congress in Sheffield of elementary teachers a very 

 able and important body of men whose movements I naturally follow 

 with strong interest at Sheffield one of the principal speakers pro- 

 posed that the elementary teachers and the universities should come 

 together on the common ground of natural science. On the ground 

 of the dead languages, he said, they could not possibly come together ; 

 but, if the "universities would take natural science for their chosen and 

 chief ground instead, they easily might. Mohammed was to go to the 

 mountain, as there was no chance of the mountain's being able to go 

 to Mohammed. 



The vice-chancellor has done me the honor to invite me to address 

 you here to-day, although I am not a member of this great university. 

 Your liberally conceived use of Sir Robert Rede's lecture leaves you 

 free in the choice of a person to deliver the lecture founded by him, 

 and on the present occasion the vice-chancellor has gone for a lecturer 



