SOUTH CAROLINA 215 



music and painting. In the southern provinces the 

 sciences have made the slowest advance. In Virginia 

 indeed there has been a College for many years at 

 Williamsburg; but the teaching formerly went for- 

 ward very drowsily. In the Carolinas so far there 

 have been only the most ordinary lower schools, and 

 no colleges for the instruction of the young. But now 

 the necessity for these is felt, and at this sitting of the 

 Assembly a proposal was made to establish an 

 Academy for the higher sciences. Many estimable 

 members supported this scheme with enthusiasm, but 

 they were unable to carry it through. The majority 

 of the votes were on the side of certain other members 

 whose opinion it was that the climate of Carolina is 

 unfavorable to study and that the best course is to 

 send young students to academies abroad. The cham- 

 pions of this opinion were not, like those who made 

 the proposal, learned men by profession ; the absurdity 

 of their notion is too evident to need explication. It 

 has not been regarded as unsuitable or idle to instruct 

 their tender youth in the first principles of human 

 knowledge and of religion. If children in this warm 

 climate show a capacity to form ideas, according to 

 their age and powers, (which nobody denies), why 

 should not youths also, with maturer powers of soul 

 and of body, with bodies used in a measure, since 

 native, to the heat and its effects? It would have 

 gone ill with the sciences, if in warm countries opinion 

 had always been as it is in Carolina. Has not every 

 science flourished at one time or another in other parts 

 of the world where there has been exposure to quite 

 as burning a sun? And certainly it has not always 

 been the fault of the climate if scholarship in such 



