334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



temporaries, or our posterity, will suffer infallibly from their viola- 

 tion. There is no possibility of hoodwinking those eternal laws which, 

 in our dealings with them, never make a mistake and never overlook 

 one, never forego au advantage, never shrink to exact retribution, 

 never feel remorse. When a person leaves college with a very respect- 

 able knowledge of Greek and Latin authors, and with little or noth- 

 ing more than that, it seems preposterous that he should think him- 

 self an educated person. If he has learned nothing about the stars 

 above his head and the earth beneath his feet; nothing about the na- 

 ture of the air which he breathes, of the water which he drinks, of the 

 food which he eats ; cannot tell why water rises in a pump, or how a 

 man breathes, and why he dies if he cannot get air to breathe ; knows 

 nothing whatever of the laws of the world in which he lives and oi 

 which he is a part, he is surely a profound ignoramus, notwithstand- 

 ing that he may be able to make indifferent Greek or Latin verses. 

 I would not for a moment undervalue the priceless benefits of a knowl- 

 edge of Greek and Latin authors ; on the contrary, I am sure that a 

 study of the works of these great minds of antiquity, full as they are 

 of the rich stores of human observation and thought, expressed in the 

 most chaste, concise, and finished language, produces a discipline of 

 intellect and a refinement of culture which can be got in no other 

 way, and the loss of which in youth nothing gained afterward will 

 ever entirely compensate for ; but I am sure also that if Plato or Aris- 

 totle, or any of those great thinkers of antiquity, were to live again 

 now, he would look with amazement and compassion, if not with con- 

 tempt, on men who are content that education should consist in study- 

 ing only the writings of the past, in utter neglect of the wonderful 

 works of Nature to which the later ages of mankind have gained access, 

 and of the vast stores of knowledge which have been gradually ac- 

 cumulated by the patient labors of successive generations of men. 

 He would be apt, I think, to say something of this sort: "Good Heav- 

 ens! we lived more than two thousand years ago; have you in all 

 that time gained no new experience of men and things which it would 

 be well to make an essential part of the intellectual culture of your 

 children? is it education enough for life now to let them learn from 

 us what we thought of men and things more than two thousand years 

 ago, and to train them in a study of the structure of our dead lan- 

 guage ? " To state the matter so, sufficeth to expose its absurdity. 



Now, the training of a medical man, when thorough, is admirable 

 in this respect, that it follows the order of Nature, beginning with 

 the less complex and rising to the more complex sciences, using the 

 lower as a ladder by which to mount up to the higher. Coming to 

 his work, as he certainly should do, with a fair knowledge of mathe- 

 matics and physics, he proceeds to the study of chemistry, and passes 

 on thence to the study of physiology ; so he lays deep and firm the 

 scientific groundwork for the study of the disorders of the structure 



