22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the discoveries and inventions of a few modern scientific investi- 

 gators. The world to-day is looking more to the future than to 

 the past, and its great and successful men are those who know the 

 laws which govern men and things and obey them. The direct 

 loss to the silk industries of France in a few years was two hun- 

 dred and fifty million dollars, and would have increased had not 

 Pasteur studied the nature of the minute organism which caused 

 the trouble, and found a means of relieving the silkworm of its 

 presence. Had the antiseptic treatment of wounds been known 

 thirty years ago, at least one hundred thousand lives might have 

 been saved during the war of the rebellion. Nature punishes 

 ignorance as sharply as willful disobedience. Incapacity and 

 crime receive the same punishment. Certainly he who knows 

 her laws and can add to our rapidly increasing amount of knowl- 

 edge of the mysterious ways in which Nature works, is as liber- 

 ally educated a person as the pedant who has had his memory 

 trained by years of classical study. 



In general, I object to that complete begging of the question 

 which assumes that an education to be called liberal must be ob- 

 tained by a course of studies comprised within any hard-and-fast 

 lines. Recognizing the demand for a more extended and broader 

 curriculum, the colleges have enlarged their courses, and some of 

 them have recently changed their requirements for admission. 

 This change must have come sooner or later. I wish to show that 

 this change was a wise one, and also to make this suggestion, that 

 other colleges, in addition to the privilege given the candidate 

 of offering either Greek or a substitute, should follow the ex- 

 ample of the few who have established an elementary course in 

 Greek for undergraduates. 



There is no substantial reason why the secondary schools 

 should teach the elements of all the studies pursued in the col- 

 leges, and that has never been attempted or suggested for all the 

 college courses. The colleges have always offered elementary 

 courses in some subjects, and one course more or less would not 

 materially affect the grade of the college. Why not offer an ele- 

 mentary course in Greek as well as in Hebrew or Sanskrit or 

 modern languages ? The colleges themselves complain that they 

 are now forced to give elementary instruction in English and no 

 instruction in several important European languages. 



This would enable those who are uncertain as to their future 

 to defer making their decision until later in life, when, if they 

 chose to select Greek, they could bring to the study more mature 

 judgment and the advantage of training in other subjects, and for 

 such students Greek would no longer be a school study, but a 

 learned study worthy of the college. Also, students who came 

 from schools where Greek is not taught would be debarred neither 



