AS HIS FRIENDS AND FAMILY KNEW HIM 131 



quoted with appreciation the saying that he who made 

 two blades of grass grow where only one had grown 

 before was a benefactor to the world. 



This practical attitude toward his work and toward 

 life in general led Maury to have very definite ideas 

 about education. These appeared to some extent in his 

 scheme for a Naval School, but they were more fully 

 revealed in his letters. Latin and Greek, he thought, 

 should not be given the place of first importance as com- 

 pared with mathematics and chemistry, and he declared 

 that West Point was the only tolerable institution in the 

 United States because of the absence there of the hum- 

 buggery of the Learned Languages. Female seminaries 

 he considered to be "downright cheats" because of the 

 superficiality of the knowledge imparted there. He was 

 opposed to the neglect of the study of English, so preva- 

 lent in the schools and colleges of his day, and thought 

 that Spanish, French, and German were languages well 

 worthy of study. Naturally, he laid great stress on the 

 value of mathematical, geographical, and other scientific 

 studies. "As for the sciences", he declared, "more is 

 now annually developed in every department thereof 

 than was ever known, dreamed, or thought of, by the 

 ancients". 



Maury himself had been largely self-educated, but his 

 speeches as well as his writings show that he had read 

 widely and discriminatingly. He was well read not only 

 in science and naval history and biography, but also in 

 the classics, and often quoted passages from Shakespeare, 

 Byron, Dante, and the Bible; in the course of a single 

 speech he referred intelligently to Plato, Plutarch, 

 Seneca, Goethe, Bacon, Newton, and other authors. He 

 is said to have been fond of reading aloud to his family 



