PAST CHANGES IN THE UNIVERSE. 



349 



who are qualified to pass its entrance examina- 

 tion, is a necessity. They maintain that without 

 the college there would be no certain provision 

 for training the kind of teachers that ought to 

 have charge of ordinary schools. They main- 

 tain still more earnestly that the college gives a 

 powerful stimulus and invaluable direction to the 

 studies in the public schools of a lower grade, and 

 that if it were abolished the whole educational sys- 

 tem would lose both its heart and its brain. There 

 are other questions raised by the controversy be- 

 tween " State" colleges and " corporate" colleges, 

 but the omnipresent " religious difficulty " is one 

 of the most exciting and the most perplexing. 

 The controversy, which has been rather animated, 

 recalls our own debates on Irish university edu- 

 cation. 



It was my intention to make a few general 

 observations on some of those aspects of the 

 American school system which are most instruc- 

 tive to an Englishman interested in popular edu- 

 cation — the independence of the local boards, 

 the advantages which the cause of education de- 

 rives from the absence of " denominational " 



schools sustained by grants of public money, the- 

 excellent effects of the free system, the influence 

 of the free high-schools on the general intelli- 

 gence of the people. But I have already written 

 far more than I intended, and I will close this 

 paper with expressing a rough judgment on the 

 relative position of elementary education in Amer- 

 ica and England. When addressing the fifteen 

 hundred young ladies in the Normal College of 

 New York, I said : " In your elementary schools 

 you are in advance of us, but, so far as the re- 

 sults of your teaching which can be definitely 

 tested by examination are concerned, not so far 

 in advance as I expected. Ten years ago we 

 were a long way behind, but we are improving 

 rapidly, and if you intend to keep before us you 

 will have to work hard." This was my impres- 

 sion after visiting schools in Chicago and Phila- 

 delphia ; it was confirmed by all that I saw in 

 New York, New Haven, and Boston. But until 

 we can get rid of the pupil-teacher system — or 

 greatly modify it — the American elementary 

 schools will be always far superior to our own in 

 their general effect on the intellectual life of the 

 child ren. — Nineteenth Centu ry. 



ON THE POSSIBILITY OF EXPLAINING PAST CHANGES 

 IN THE UNIVEESE BY CAUSES AT PKESENT IN OP- 

 ERATION. 



Br S. TOLVER PHESTON. 



ANY attempt to explain the phenomena of 

 Nature by the recognized working of 

 physical causation has been invariably welcomed. 

 Thus the explanation of geological changes 

 through the influence of time, by the recognized 

 working of natural causes, is now generally ac- 

 cepted with satisfaction, and the idea of cata- 

 clysms or catastrophes has been abandoned. 

 Might not the same thing apply to cosmical 

 changes (or to changes in the universe), or would 

 not an attempt to explain them by the recog- 

 nized action of physical causation be as desir- 

 able as in the case of geological changes ? 



One insuperable barrier in the way of ex- 

 plaining past changes in the universe, by causes 

 at present in operation, has been the supposition 

 — in the absence of any explanation of the mech- 

 anism of gravity — that the range of gravity ex- 

 tends to indefinite distances, and consequently 

 that every portion of the universe tends to ag- 

 glomerate or collect together into one mass, 



whereby all conditions of stability or permanence 

 are excluded. Another difficulty has been to 

 conceive how the energy (in the form of heat) 

 dissipated by matter in the ether of space could 

 ever again be made available or retransferred to 

 matter. Now, in the first place, it has never 

 been proved that the range of gravity extends to 

 indefinite distances, and, on examination, conclu- 

 sions so incongruous are involved in this assump- 

 tion that they themselves render the assumption 

 unlikely. Thus, imagine the incongruity of the 

 idea of an unstable universe tending to agglom- 

 erate into one (perhaps infinite) mass, gravity 

 itself becoming (in the limit) infinite, so that the 

 conditions of life would be rendered utterly im- 

 possible. Can it appear reasonable to conclude 

 that physical causation should be so adapted as 

 inevitably (in time) to produce such a state of 

 things as this, or to involve instability and con- 

 fusion ? 



According to the only physical theory of 



