214 STATE BOAKD OF AGEICULTURE. 



When, at a later date, scientific courses were adopted, they were put on an 

 inferior footing, and inductive sciences were admitted unwillingly to any fair 

 share of attention. 



Examples could be multiplied extensively to show the grudging way the 

 claims of science were admitted, and the inferior discij^line that was required of 

 students of scientific courses, Avhile on the other hand these students were 

 expected to sustain themselves as against others who had. received three more 

 years of instruction in the schools. 



In more recent years a great change has been made in the courses of study 

 that colleges present to the choice of students. Harvard and Yale, and a large 

 number of colleges have their scientific schools and courses. As yet, however, 

 the scientific courses are held in inferior estimation. In most institutions this 

 lower rank is forced upon the course by its inferior standard for admission. 

 The University of Michigan, always in the advance guard of progress in educa- 

 tional matters, is one of the very few, if not the only one that has put scientific 

 and classical education on an equality of rank, and the prejudice tluit still 

 lingers against the scientific courses as inferior, will soon die out when the 

 preparatory schools that feed the University begin to take a like pride in fitting 

 for the scientific courses that they do for the classical ones, and when the col- 

 lege students in the sciences exhibit a like discipline and power with the others. 



IN PART JUST. 



A part of this predilection for the classics is just. Our civilization, our lite- 

 rary culture, our philosophy comes so largely from tlie Latin and Greek that no 

 other ancient languages and literature can compare with them in interest and 

 usefulness to us. The Grecian models are in their limited way so faultless that 

 they delight and instruct us. Nor as fountains of knowledge are they by any 

 means exhausted. When we thought we knew Athenian history aright, and 

 that it warned us against democracy, then there comes a Grote, wiio, reading 

 the same old Greek books under the influences of a new age, and with the expe- 

 rience of a statesman, shows us how this same history tells for republican institu- 

 tions and freedom. Classical courses besides have been found efficient means 

 of education in tlie past. It is the meat on which the statesmen, lawyers, theo- 

 logians and scholars of the past have been fed. 



IN PAliT HISTOIIICAL. 



In part this predominance of classical studies is an inheritance from times so 

 unlike ours, that the reasons for it no longer exist. In the Dark Ages people 

 did not read. Turn to Ilallam for the picture of the dense darkness of the 

 times. According to Pauli, in his life of King Alfred, judges could not read 

 the laws they administered. The revival of learning, and tlie taking of Con- 

 stantinople by the Turks, filled Europe with scholars and with books. In what 

 languages should they read and study? In Latin and Greek, for there were no 

 otlier. In what should they write? In Latin; for English, German, and 

 Frencli were then unshaped, or at least thought to be narrow and unsettled. 

 Latin became the language of scholars ; and so late is the sway of this language, 

 tliat Bacon wrote his Philosophy, Newton his Principia, Milton the Republic's 

 official letters, and Berkley his Theory of Vision in it. It still lingers in Trien- 

 nial catalogues and commencement addresses. Formerly these ancient lan- 

 guages were es.'ential to the educated man, for without them literature, science, 

 and professional knowledge were not to be had. It is so no longer. German 



