176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ternal means, and tlie no less necessary recognition of coworkers 

 and youth. Here, again, are afforded in intercourse with academic 

 youth, motive and opportunity to attract pupils to co-operation 

 and to train successors in the work. The continuity in scientific 

 labor, to which Germany owes a large part of its success in this 

 field, certainly depends chiefly on this association of investigation 

 and teaching at our universities. 



How closely the history of science in Germany in the last 

 century is connected with the history of the universities is made 

 plain in the work of Lexis on the German universities, published 

 in 1893, at the instance of the Minister of Worship. Every step 

 forward in research and its permanent interweaving with the regu- 

 lar work is associated with the foundation of new chairs and new 

 institutes at the universities. Most evident is the growth in the 

 extension of the philosophical and medical faculties. Instead of 

 the eight or ten chairs in the philosophical and the two or three 

 in the medical faculty, which were regarded as sufficient in the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we have at the middle and 

 smaller as well as at the larger universities three and four times as 

 many, including the extraordinaries, and even six and eight times. 

 The institutes of every kind nearly all date from the last century. 



The German people have expended and are expending every 

 year much on their universities. No other people proportionately 

 devotes so large sums to the endowment of its high-school instruc- 

 tion. We may well say that it has not been a fruitless application 

 of capital, and hope that it will not be in the future. The present 

 repute of the German name among the nations of the earth has 

 grown in no small degree out of its universities. It has some- 

 times been pointed out that the teaching work of the incumbents of 

 some of the chairs that of Oriental languages, for instance has 

 been very insignificant ; the cost, per head, of the instruction given 

 has been counted up and found to be high ; and it has even been 

 proposed to maintain chairs for such specialties only at two of the 

 large universities. Such calculations are niggardly and not just. 

 The existence of a large number of chairs is not of little impor- 

 tance to the permanence of the scientific achievements of the Ger- 

 man people in these fields, even though we are not a wealthy 

 people. The few thousand marks which are paid to the merit of 

 men like Riickert and Bopp ought not to be regarded by any one 

 as wasted, even though their work were substantially null. The 

 university chair in Germany is at the same time a form of endow- 

 ment for scientific labor. It is the external stimulus to strive for 

 distinction in a kind of work which has at present no marketable 

 value, and makes it possible to devote one's self to it permanently. 

 If it produces work of inferior money value, in what field does not 

 such work slip in ? 



