558 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



courses in masonry and stone cutting be added to the college cur- 

 riculum. The plea is not consistent. The Hebrew people and the 

 Hebrew Scriptures have had greater influence upon mankind than that 

 exerted by the Greeks and Eomans or their literature, yet no one has 

 demanded that lads be drilled in the accents and paradigms of the 

 Hebrew language. The Greeks owed their civilization to Egypt and 

 Babylonia, yet no one has wept because the study of hieroglyphics and 

 cuneiform is not a prominent feature in the curriculum of secondary 

 schools and colleges. English translations suffice for these languages; 

 it is difficult to conceive why they should not suffice for Greek and 

 Latin. 



It is not easy to discover grounds justifying diatribes against the 

 changed attitude toward Latin and Greek as college studies. When one 

 challenges the correctness of the classicist's position, the good man seems 

 to be shocked by the questioner's audacity, he wanders amid generalities 

 and usually finds relief in gloomy reflections respecting this utilitarian 

 age. But the classicist forgets or does not know that, until very recent 

 times, the study of Latin and Greek had nothing whatever to do with 

 mental training, was not supposed to have any special value in that con- 

 nection. It was as purely utilitarian as the study of bookkeeping in a 

 commercial school, the erection of an anvil in a blacksmith's shop or the 

 purchase of a ticket before entering the train. The would-be student 

 learned Latin just as he learned to read — that the road to knowledge or 

 to preferment might be open to him. In the old universities lectures 

 and text-books were in Latin; many of the Christian Fathers wrote in 

 Greek and would-be theologians needed that language. The university 

 was closed to the man ignorant of Latin as an American college is closed 

 to the man ignorant of English. It was for this reason that when col- 

 leges were founded in this land, the chief emphasis was given to the 

 classic tongues; they were established merely as schools preparatory to 

 the university work of theological seminaries, whose text-books were in 

 Latin and Greek. 



But the Eoman church lost control of the intellectual world ; Latin 

 ceased to be the universal language of scholars ; lectures and text-books 

 were given in the vernacular. Even theological seminaries, outside of 

 the Eoman church, discarded the old text-books and replaced them with 

 modern works of less polemic spirit. Seventy-five years ago all excuse 

 for keeping Latin and Greek in the college curriculum had disappeared. 

 Those languages had held their place because of utility and that had 

 disappeared. But the colleges were here, the largest of them very small ; 

 their curriculum was a survival of the past, no longer useful, it was 

 barely ornamental. A new era had been opened by the study of science, 

 but those who controlled the colleges knew nothing of science and most 

 of them thought of it only as an invention of the devil — a new way of 



