534 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Already innovations are being made in the training for commercial 

 life. We shall probably see greater changes in the future. As a 

 preparation for professional life — a ' training ' in the athletic sense 

 of the term — the classics hold the field. They develop the muscles 

 of the mind, without attempting to give specialized skill in their use. 

 The story of their attainment to this supreme position in education 

 is a curious one. It is a story of blundering along the right road, 

 reaching the right goal with the wrong end in view. During the 

 Eenaissance, men relearned the languages in which the knowledge of 

 the ancients was enshrined, in order that they might extract their 

 treasures of science and thought. With this fresh growth of learning, 

 scholars felt the need of a common language in which to acquire 

 knowledge and to express the results of their investigations. It was 

 a necessity in the days of oral teaching and itinerant study. Equipped 

 with Latin, an English student was equally at home in Cambridge, 

 Paris or Padua. Frenchmen, Germans, Italians and Spaniards spoke 

 and wrote in the same language as his teachers at home. Erasmus 

 might ' learn in Oxford, teach in Cambridge,' correspond with all 

 the scholars in Europe. 



The first generous handfuls of classic wisdom snatched, scholars 

 joined in a pedantic contest for the crumbs. This search required 

 accurate knowledge of the languages which encased them. It was im- 

 possible to pay too much attention to their form. National, or rather 

 university, rivalry instigated the representatives of learning to acquire 

 a correct and elegant latinity in which to express their thoughts. It 

 became traditional that a Scholar (with a capital S) was a man able 

 to write Ciceronian Latin without the aid of dictionary or books of 

 accidence ; and this medieval tradition still holds in our public schools. 

 When one reflects upon the purpose for which so much effort was 

 originally spent, it is not a little humorous to find the effort continued 

 for generations after the purpose has ceased to guide it. The results 

 for which our ancestors strove have long been attained. The thought 

 of the ancients has long been accessible to every one who can read 

 English. Their science, which was living to the scholars of the 

 Eenaissance, is a historic curiosity, interesting merely as a stage in the 

 progress of the human mind. We can attain all that the Eenaissance 

 sought for, and an infinity beside, without knowledge of either Greek 

 or Latin. Yet in the epoch of Winchester rifles we still practise with 

 flint locks. We stitch samplers in the days of sewing machines. 

 A Eunic inscription is scarcely more out of date than a Latin oration, 

 since both are equally things of the past ; both have equally fallen into 

 disuse. Yet, with all the zeal of the Eenaissance and with an equal 

 appearance of seriousness, we spend years in preparing our boys to 

 write Latin orations without the aid of books of reference. The 

 cache of preserved fruits which the Eenaissance discovered has long 



