252 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



were done differently. A wise man said to himself, 'I 

 have discovered a great truth. I must impart my know- 

 ledge to others. ' And so he began to preach his wisdom 

 whenever and whereever he could get people to listen to 

 him, like a soap-box orator. If he was an interesting 

 speaker, the crowd came and stayed ; if he was dull, they 

 shrugged their shoulders and continued their way. By 

 and by, certain young men began to come regularly to 

 hear the words of wisdom of this great teacher. They 

 brought copybooks with them and little bottles of ink and 

 goose quills, and they wrote down what seemed to them 

 to be important. One day, it rained. The teacher and 

 his pupils retired to an empty basement or to the room of 

 the professor. The learned man sat in his chair and the 

 boys sat on the floor. That was the beginning of the uni- 

 versity, the 'universitat' — a college of professor and 

 students in the Middle Ages, when the teacher counted 

 for everything and the building in which he taught 

 counted for very little." 



So the university was originally built around a man 

 who had a new idea which he wished to impart to others. 

 It was said in New England a hundred years ago that a 

 college consisted of Horace Bushnell sitting on one end 

 of a log and a student with a Greek textbook on the other. 

 Here were all the essentials for the college of that day — 

 the learned teacher and the responsive student, who by 

 personal contact with his teacher absorbed his wisdom 

 and profited by his experiences. But the modern college 

 teaches more than the "humanities". With the develop- 

 ment of the natural sciences in the latter half of the 18th 

 century and the first half of the 19th, and the applica- 

 tion of scientific discoveries to industrial life, came the 

 demand for technical training in laboratories and work- 

 shops. 



Naturally, this had a marked effect on our universities. 

 Law and theology, which consist of principles, preced- 

 ents and moral maxims, can be taught from textbooks 

 today, just as they were two hundred years ago, but the 

 development of the natural. sciences and the addition to 

 the university curriculum of courses in mechanical, elec- 

 trical, and mining engineering and other technical sub- 



