TEE LARGER IMPORT OF SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION. 453 



Scientific education is catholic ; it embraces the whole field of 

 human learning. No student can master all knowledge in the short 

 years of his academic life, but a young man of ability and industry 

 may reasonably hope to master the outlines of science, obtain a deep 

 insight into the methods of scientific research, and at the same time 

 secure an initiation into some one of the departments of science, in 

 such a manner that he may fully appreciate the multitude of facts 

 upon which scientific conclusions rest, and be prepared to enter the field 

 of scientific research himself and make additions to the sum of human 

 knowledge. Honest investigation is but the application of common 

 sense to the solution of the uaknown. Science does not wait on Genius, 

 but is the companion of Industry. Under the regime of the elder edu- 

 cation, the larger number of those who prepared themselves to be 

 scholars, by acquiring the languages in which scholarship was embodied, 

 never passed beyond the portal to knowledge, but speedily fell back 

 into the ranks of the unlearned. Only the few. went on to explore the 

 fields open before them ; many icere called, hut feio were chosen. 

 Scientific education takes men at once into the very midst of the new 

 philosophy. 



There is no calling in life to which a cultured man may properly 

 aspire in which a scientific training is not essential to success. This 

 can not here be fully set forth, but some illustration. may be given. If 

 the scholar would devote himself to law — law itself is now a science, 

 and, in the application of the principles of law to facts as they exist in 

 modern civilization, a general knowledge of the facts which constitute 

 the body of science is essential. In the East some of the greatest law- 

 yers of the land are to-day engaged in gigantic litigation relating 

 to the invention of the telephone, and in the far West other great 

 lawyers are engaged in litigation relating to mines, which involve the 

 facts and principles of geology. On every hand are kindred illus- 

 trations. 



But there is a line of facts in the history of law which peculiarly 

 illustrates this proposition. In savagery and in barbarism despotism is 

 not highly developed. The greatest despotisms of the world were 

 established in early civilization. In the main these despotisms were 

 established on four fundamental ideas : first, there was proiDcrty in 

 man ; second, tenure to land was feudal ; third, the king was the 

 fountain of justice ; fourth, facts were established by compurgation. 

 The last is of interest here. 



In early civilization there were no proper legal methods by which 

 to determine the facts involved in legal controversy, and, when courts 

 were convened and juries organized, the facts were to be obtained from 

 the averments of the interested parties, and no system of assembling 

 evidence by witnesses, as now known in our courts, then existed. The 

 parties to litigation, civil or criminal, made their statements and sub- 

 stantiated them by compurgators. Every man in an ancient comma- 



