STUDIES ON MUSEUMS AND KINDRED INSTITUTIONS. 377 



tifsaiul lighted the liuiii) of our knowledge at their altai>. The Aiiiericauy have 

 found the love of truth, tlie naered yearning after knowledge and poetry in Heidel- 

 berg, Gottingen, Tubingen, etc. When we look down npon the red roof.s and towers 

 of Gottingen, as ujjon the red marvel-flower of wisdom as it lies there surronnded 

 by a garland of lindens standing on the old walls, we find there not only the student 

 (|uarter9 of Bismarck but also the places where Bancroft and Longfellow intrenched 

 themselves behind their books. To be sure the German universities have not served 

 as models for our own, l)ut we have adapted the spirit of their knowledge to our cir- 

 cumstances. * * * Our debt to German science is great; we can not repay it. 



T heard these very words, that the debt of gratitude could never be 

 repaid to German^^, from the mouth of one of the professors of the 

 Technical High School in Boston, when, upon niy thanking- him for 

 the very obliging reception which 1 had met with, he refused to accept 

 m}' thanks. 



(In the lil^rary of Edison's pri\'ute laboratory at Orange, near New 

 York, I found, as artistic ornaments, the bust of Alexander von Hum- 

 Itoldtand the portraits of Bunsen, Helmholtz, Kirchhotf, Kopp, Liebig, 

 and Magnus, but of no other scientists. When I told Edison how 

 pleased I was to see that he surrounded himself with the portraits of 

 German scientists, he told me of his friendship with Helmholtz and 

 Siemens, and mentioned that he had that very morning to consult a 

 treatise by Wohler.) 



The present ambassador of the United States to the German Empire, 

 A. D. White, at a banquet given in July of this year to the American 

 Mechanical and Civil Engineering Association in Berlin, expressed 

 himself in the following terms: He looked back with great satisfaction 

 to the time, thirty years before, when he had studied the conditions of 

 the high schools and the technical schools in Berlin, he had been able, 

 on his return to America, to point to these institutions as worthy of 

 imitation. As a consequence Cornell University, of which, for a 

 quarter of a century, he was the first president, and other special and 

 technical schools were founded. Many of his countrymen had received 

 in German}' the impulse and the knowledge for the establishment of 

 institutions of learning in their own land. He had returned to Amer- 

 ica with love and reverence for his teachers. He, w^th man}- of his 

 countrymen, regarded Germany as his second fatherland. 



L. Triang said, in a lecture on "Germany in the American univer- 

 sities," recently delivered before the German Society' of Columbia 

 University {Zeitgeist, March 5, 1J)()()): 



The student who, after completion of the studies usual in his country, wishes to 

 perfect himself in his profession and carry on sjieciai studies, almost invariably goes 

 to Germany, where a great propoi'tion of the entire body of American teachers have 

 received their final education and imbibed the German spirit of learning and the 

 German scientific faithfulness. 



Prof. Harry Thurston Peck, of Columbia University, and, as editor of the Boolc- 

 innn, one of our most prominent critics [I quote from an article by M. Groszmann 

 in The Open Court ((^hicago), October, 1899, p. 620], showed in a recent article that 

 the old traditions of American education have been wiped out by German infiuenc-e; 



