VIII UNIVERSITIES : ACTUAL AND IDEAL 215 



English University men remain in their present 

 state of barbarous ignorance of even the rudiments 

 of scientific culture. 



Yet another step needs to be made before 

 Science can be said to have taken its proper place 

 in the Universities. That is its recognition as a 

 Faculty, or branch of study demanding recognition 

 and special organisation, on account of its bearing 

 on the wants of mankind. The Faculties of Theo- 

 logy, Law, and Medicine, are technical schools, 

 intended to equip men who have received general 

 culture, with the special knowledge which is 

 needed for the proper performance of the duties 

 of clergymen, lawyers, and medical practitioners. 



When the material well-being of the country 

 depended upon rude pasture and agriculture, and 

 still ruder mining ; in the days when all the 

 innumerable applications of the principles of 

 physical science to practical purposes were non- 

 existent even as dreams ; days which men living 

 may have heard their fathers speak of; what little 

 physical science could be seen to bear directly 

 upon human life, lay within the province of 

 Medicine. Medicine was the foster-mother of 

 Chemistry, because it has to do with the prepara- 

 tion of drugs and the detection of poisons ; of 

 Botany, because it enabled the physician to 

 recognise medicinal herbs ; of Comparative Ana- 

 tomy and Physiology, because the man who studied 

 Human Anatomy and Physiology for purely 



74 



