SCIENCE TEACHING. 523 



tion we are justly to consider the boundlessness of the opportu- 

 nities, the vastness of the means, and stringency of the duties. 

 Regarded under this light, and in spite of many notable examples 

 to the contrary both in the past and in the present, it does not 

 admit of a shadow of doubt but that on the whole these oppor- 

 tunities have been greatly wasted, these means wrongfully ap- 

 plied, and these duties wantonly neglected. 



These universities were primarily intended for the teaching of 

 those branches of knowledge which have since developed into sci- 

 ence. I imagine that education as understood for instance by the 

 Greek was mainly athletic, scientific, aesthetic, literary, and politi- 

 cal ; literature in its widest, politics in its narrowest sense. Their 

 philosophers looked around, as all philosophers are bound to do, 

 as most have done excepting Kant and Comte, whose philoso- 

 phy, based upon insufficient scientific knowledge, crumbles to 

 pieces when touched. The Greek philosopher got much of his 

 honey from abroad ; but the comb he built for it was geometric, 

 universal. 



It was for the purpose of understanding such scientific writers 

 as Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, that the " schools " were founded 

 and supported. Then we have Plato, who seems to me to be for- 

 ever hanging on to the hem of the garment of the Great Master. 

 Much of this of course came through the Latin language. But 

 shortly the means became the end. The language was found to 

 contain a literature. Then a curious but not unnatural event 

 happened. The means of acquiring knowledge in a foreign lan- 

 guage degenerated — I will use no other word — into the study of 

 that language, redeemed by the simultaneous acquirement of its 

 marvelous literary treasures. Hence arose the dreadful school of 

 dogmatic grammarians and pseudophilologists. Their day is pass- 

 ing, because grammar and philology are becoming sciences as 

 exact at least as geology or biology. 



It is, I think, hopefully to be expected that we shall soon lose 

 sight of those dreadful creatures who used to wobble their heads 

 over what they in their ignorance conceived to be a false quan- 

 tity, often mistaking accent for quantity, partly through want of 

 scientific training, partly through ignorance of the knowledge ac- 

 quired by other nations. Such creatures were, perhaps, the natu- 

 ral outgrowth of the state of transition between Aristotle and 

 Darwin, between Archimedes and Joule. 



The really frightful outcome of all this was that, for a time, 

 information took the place of knowledge ; and the culture of the 

 university was little beyond that of the cabman, the postman, or 

 at best that of the librarian. 



Perhaps the very greatest revelations made to man in the his- 

 torical past took place in the last quarter of the last century and 



