732 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rather than aided. I know a well-known naturalist who twenty 

 years ago was dropped from the rolls of one of our State univer- 

 sities ; not because he was idle or vicious or inattentive, but be- 

 cause he spent too much of his time studying birds, and did not 

 keep up with his classmates in some of the conventional require- 

 ments in mathematics or Latin. The college had no use for bird 

 knowledge, but it came out strong on irregular verbs. And so, like 

 hundreds of others, this man went away, and carried on his own 

 studies in his own fashion. And others similarly situated, with 

 aspirations in science or literature, history or engineering, went 

 away or stayed away, andgrew up untouched by the higher edu- 

 cation of their times. The elective system provides for such as 

 these. It not only gives a new impulse to the students' work, but 

 it brings a new body of students under collegiate influences. 



Nothing in our educational history has been more remarkable 

 than the increase in numbers of students in our principal colleges, 

 and the corresponding increase in influence of these schools within 

 the last ten years. Yet nothing is more evident than the fact that 

 these students are not going to college in the old-fashioned sense. 

 The old-fashioned college ideals are not rising in value ; but new 

 possibilities of training and the inspiration of modern thought 

 bring to the university all sorts and conditions of men and women 

 whose predecessors twenty years ago would not have thought of 

 entering an American college. Where old educational ideas still 

 reign, be the college rich or poor, there is no increase in numbers 

 nor in influence. Unless a college education involves the emanci- 

 pation of thought, unless it gives something to think about, it has 

 no place in the educational system of the future. The future of 

 our country will rest with college men, because the college of the 

 future will meet the needs of all men of power, and draw them to 

 its walls. 



Scientific men have no interest in the depreciation of literary 

 or classical training. The revolution in our higher education is 

 not a revolt against the classics. It is an appeal from the assump- 

 tion that the classics furnish the only gate to culture. It asserts 

 the existence of a thousand gates, as many ways to culture as 

 there are types of men. Scientific training asks only for freedom 

 of development, and for the right to be judged by its own fruits. 



With the growth of investigation has come the demand for 

 better means of work, better apparatus, more and better books, 

 larger collections, and especially collections for work, not for show 

 or surprise. Better teachers are needed, and more of them. A 

 healthy competition is set up, by which in these later days a man's 

 pay is in some degree proportioned to his power, and the competi- 

 tion for places among half -starved men is changing into a compe- 

 tition for men among; rich and ambitious institutions. 



