88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



extent this was due to the attention he began to give to his mother- 

 tongue and to the great authors of his own and of neighboring lands. 

 Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Horace, did something for him ; but 

 what was that compared to the intellectual wealth of the new world 

 of science and the vivid inspiration that came to him from the pages 

 of modern thought ? To deny this is to refuse to see the light of 

 the noonday sun. Poets like Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere, Schiller, 

 Goethe, took a powerful hold of his imagination, refined his moral 

 nature as no ancient poet could, and filled his soul with ideals of the 

 modern world. Voltaire and Hume, Rousseau and Diderot, Carlyle 

 and Kant, Herder and Lessing, taught him how to reason, and to deal 

 with the problems of modern life. And to-day can it be truly said 

 that the inspiration the German student draws from Plato and Aris- 

 totle can be compared to the powerful impulse and the incomparable 

 intellectual help he receives from contemporary writers like Hum- 

 boldt, Ritter, Peschel, Schleiden, Haeckel, and a host of others in 

 various fields of science and philosophy in his own land, and, among 

 neighboring nations, from the pages of a Charles Darwin, a Huxley, 

 Tyndall, Claude Bernard, and entu-e galaxies of others ? 



"We may repeat, therefore, that the German gymnasium teaches 

 Latin and Greek as specialties, and that if this special training has 

 not shown in its students the bad effects that are usually attributed 

 to such training, the merit of having prevented these effects lies with 

 those other studies which, as we have seen, occupy the student for 

 the other half of his time. If, now, we compare the courses of the 

 corresponding American schools with those of the Prussian (or Ger- 

 man) gymnasium, we find that, while the American school has the 

 same studies, it does not succeed in doing the same work. Hence, in 

 order to make up for the deficiency of time, the preparatory training 

 is continued in the college proper. But if the object were to give 

 the American student as thorough a training in the Greek and Latin, 

 without neglecting the other studies taught in the German gymnasi- 

 um, the entire time of the college would be taken up by these so-called 

 preparatory studies, so that the college would have no time, or but 

 very little, left for other work. This is a very serious objection to 

 the adoption of the German system, and the only alternative would 

 be to establish our preparatory schools exactly on the same basis as 

 the German gymnasium. But would this be desirable, even if it were 

 feasible ? 



Unquestionably the habit of constant application for so many 

 years, during which his study-hours are twice as numerous as those 

 of his American colleague, while his vacations are briefer and his days 

 of recreation fewer, makes the German student unusually capable to 

 profit by further instruction after having passed through the gymna- 

 sium. He is very accurate in some knowledge, and perhaps the very 

 fact that he has specially emphasized a few branches so that now he 



