FAKMERS' INSTITUTES. 215 



and French ^vill open more treasures of learning than all the languages the 

 earth possessed fifty years ago. The English alone will do it. If Latin and 

 Greek still deserve the predominance they possessed it must bo on new grounds, 

 and the fact that what was best educationally in former times is still so in changed 

 conditions, if it be a fact, is, as Goldwin Smith has pointed out, a simple, 

 althougli remarkable coincidence. 



The Greek and Latin books that furnished all the matter of education in 

 old times had much to do with tlie relative esteem in which science and litera- 

 tvn-e were held. What could the scholars of those times read? Certainly what 

 the classics contained, not what they did not afford. These books contained 

 treasures of history and poetry ; they discoursed of rhetoric, politics, morals, 

 philosophy, and art. They had comparatively little of science, and almost 

 nothing of the practical affairs of life. The curious may see this matter clearly 

 set forth in John Mason Good's Book of Nature, Scries 2, Lecture eleven. Aris- 

 totle, translated from the Arabic, introduced tiie scholastic philosophy ; Greek 

 and Latin brought metaphysics, literature and languages to the schools, and 

 poetry, painting, and sculpture became the pride of courts ; but science, and 

 even mathematics, languislied. When Oxford had thirty thousand students, 

 and Paris still more, Koger Bacon could find but two good mathematicians in 

 the world. 



Craik (English Literature, Vol. 1), says metaphysics and logic, together with 

 divinity, — which was converted into little else than a subject of metaphysical 

 and logical contention, — so occupied the crowd of intellectual inquirers, tliat 

 except the professional branches of law and medicine, scarcely any other studies 

 were attended to. Down from times when this was a true picture of its edu- 

 cated men, our universities and colleges have come impressed with no inconsid- 

 erable portion, so to speak, of the old neglect of natural science. Great schools 

 are conservative, and with a haughty disdain of learning not imparted by them- 

 selves, they adhere to their first definition of learning, and the veneration every 

 man pays to the institution where he took his degree, helps to preserve the notion 

 that there is but one way to the ranks of tJie educated and tliat is by the beaten 

 track of a collegiate course of Latin, Greek, and philosophy. It is an old 

 saying that possession is nine points of the law. 



DISCIPLINE. 



It is said that scientific studies do not discipline the mind. Sir William 

 Hamilton thinks the physical sciences are good for tho^e dull alumni who are 

 incapable of thought, — (Discussions, Harper's Ed., p. 105.) He and such as 

 he know the educating effects of the studies they have themselves pursued, but 

 do not know the value of studies into the spirit of which they have not entered. 

 All things seem easy to him who has not tried them, and every youth would 

 drive the chariot of the sun if he could. Science seems a mere committing of 

 facts from a book, — that is the idea these scholars have of it. Dr. Wayland, 

 formerly of Kalamazoo, overheard a graduate expressing regret that he had had 

 but four weeks' study of geology. He heard his classical friend, an able and 

 well informed man, reply, "Well, I presume that in that time you learned all 

 that is to be known about geology." 



An able educator once parsed with me an hour in a class in zoology, and on 

 leaving remarked, "Do you call that education? I," he said "certainly do 

 not." It seemed to him a tax on the memory alone. There is a way, of 

 course, to make ai y study a process of nieii.orizing. It is not confined to nat- 

 ural history. Carlyle thus thunders his condemnation of the routine study of 



