SOME BEGINNINGS IN SCIENCE. 



765 



probably be mucb promoted. The notion that true learning con- 

 sists rather in exercising the reasoning faculties and laying up a 

 store of useful knowledge, than in overloading the memory with 

 words of dead languages, is becoming daily more prevalent. It 

 is hard to deny a young gentleman the honor of a college, 

 after he has with much labor and painful attention acciuired a 

 competent knowledge of the sciences, of composing and speak- 



The Old Telescopes as thet are To-dat in the Mitchell Observatory. 

 Drawn by E. L. Harris. 



ing with propriety in his own language, and has conned the first 

 principles of whatever might render him useful or creditable 

 in the world, merely because he could not read a language two 

 thousand years old.^' This letter might well be dated from 

 Boston a century later, for it was nearly a century before such 

 ideas of the essentials of an education were gaining ground with 

 our foremost educators. The literary societies established in 

 1795 took mottoes in keeping with the spirit of the day, that of 

 the Dialectic Society being " Love of Virtue and Science," and 



