SCIENCE AND THE COLLEGES. 729 



be the aim of the colleges. " Colleges can only serve us/' said 

 Emerson long ago, " when their aim is not to drill, but to create. 

 They will gather every ray of genius to their hospitable halls, 

 that by their combined influence they may set the heart of the 

 youth in flame." It was in 18G4 that Agassiz said, in advocating 

 the elective system, that although it might possibly give the pre- 

 text for easy evasion of duty to some inefficient or lazy students, 

 it gave larger opportunities to the better class, and the university 

 should adapt itself to the latter rather than to the former. " The 

 bright students," he said, " are now deprived of the best advan- 

 tages to be had because the dull or the indifferent must be treated 

 like children." 



In the same year Emerson spoke of the old grudge he had for 

 forty-five years owed Harvard College for the cruel waste of two 

 years of college time on mathematics without any attempt to 

 adapt these tasks to the capacity of learners. " I still remember," 

 he said, " the useless pains I took, and my serious recourse to my 

 tutor for aid he did not know how to give me. And now I see 

 to-day the same indiscriminate imposing of mathematics on all 

 students during two years. Ear, or no ear, you shall all learn 

 music, to the waste of the time and health of a large part of the 

 class." 



I remember well the beginning of the modern system in the 

 university of a neighboring State. It came as the permission, 

 carefully guarded, to certain students who had creditably passed 

 the examination of the freshman year in Latin, to take, instead of 

 the sophomore Latin, some advanced work in zoology. To the 

 very great surprise of the Professor of Latin, those who availed 

 themselves of this opportunity " to take something easy " were not 

 the worst students in Latin, but the best. Those who were at- 

 tracted by investigation chose the new road; the plodders and 

 shirks were contented with the evils they had, rather than to fly 

 to others that they knew not of. And so, little by little in that 

 institution, and in all the others, has come about a relaxation of 

 the chains of the curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge, and the 

 extension of opportunities for students to find out the facts of 

 Nature for themselves, rather than to rest with the conserved 

 wisdom of an incurious past. 



Thus slowly and painfully came about the development of the 

 scientific courses. We can all remember the dreary time when, 

 in the tedious faculty meetings, we used to devise scientific 

 courses, short in time and weak in quality, for students who 

 could not or would not learn Latin and Greek. There was no 

 scientific preparation or achievement required in these courses. 

 They were scientific only in the sense that they were not any- 

 thing else. Their degree of B. S., which should have meant 



