58 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



science into the ordinary university course, to which I have alluded. 

 It is a difficulty which will not be overcome, until years of patient 

 study have organized scientific teaching as well as, or I hope better 

 than, classical teaching has been organized hitherto. 



A little while ago, I ventured to hint a doubt as to the perfection 

 of some of the arrangements in the ancient universities of England ; 

 but, in their provision for giving instruction in science as such, and 

 without direct reference to any of its practical applications, they have 

 set a brilliant example. Within the last twenty years, Oxford alone 

 has sunk more than a hundred and twenty thousand pounds in build- 

 ino- and furnishing physical, chemical, and physiological laboratories, 

 and a magnificent museum, arranged with an almost luxurious regard 

 for the needs of the student. Cambridge, less rich, but aided by the 

 munificence of her chancellor, is taking the same course ; and, in a 

 few years, it will be for no lack of the means and appliances of sound 

 teaching, if the mass of English university men remain in their present 

 state of barbarous ignorance of even the rudiments of scientific culture. 



Yet another step needs to be made before science can be said to 

 have taken its proper place in the universities. That is its recogni- 

 tion as a faculty, or branch of study demanding recognition and spe- 

 cial organization, on account of its bearing on the wants of mankind. 

 The faculties of theology, law, and medicine, are technical schools, 

 intended to equip men, who have received general culture, with the 

 special knowledge which is needed for the proper performance of the 

 duties of clergymen, lawyers, and medical practitioners. 



When the material well-being of the country depended upon rude 

 pasture and agriculture, and still ruder mining ; in the days when 

 all the innumerable applications of the principles of physical science 

 to practical purposes were non-existent even as dreams — days which 

 men living may have heard their fathers speak of— what little physi- 

 cal science could be seen to bear directly upon human life lay within 

 the province of medicine. Medicine was the foster-mother of chemis- 

 try, because it has to do with the preparation of drugs and the detec- 

 tion of poisons ; of botany, because it enabled the physician to rec- 

 ognize medicinal herbs; of comparative anatomy and physiology, 

 because the man who studied human anatomy and physiology for 

 purely medical purposes was led to extend his studies to the rest of 

 the animal world. 



Within my recollection, the only way in which a student could 

 obtain any thing like a training in physical science was, by attending 

 the lectures of the professors of physical and natural science attached 

 to the medical schools. But, in the course of the last thirty years, 

 both foster-mother and child have grown so big, that they threaten 

 not only to crush one another, but to press the very life out of the 

 unhappy student who enters the nursery ; to the great detriment of all 

 three. 



