776 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



and the support of the most powerful social influence, it is difficult to 

 understand on what the opposition to the free development of the 

 " new education " is based. Are not gentlemen, who have been talking 

 of a revolution in education, taking counsel of their fears rather than 

 of their better judgment ; and are they not forgetting that the teachers 

 of natural science have the same interest in upholding the principles 

 of sound education as have their classical colleagues ? Certainly there 

 can be no question that, in the future as in the past, they will ever 

 seek to maintain the integrity of all the great departments of the uni- 

 versity unimpaired. It has happened before this that the judgment, 

 even of intelligent men, has been warped by their class relations or 

 supposed interests ; but as, in this country, the learned class has no 

 control of government patronage, we may at least hope that the dis- 

 cussion of the Greek question will never assume with us the great 

 bitterness that a similar controversy has aroused in Germany. 



There has been a great deal said in this discussion about the " hu- 

 manities," and it has been assumed that, while the analysis of the 

 Greek verb is "humanizing," the analysis of the phenomena of Nature 

 is " materializing." I can discover nothing humanizing in the one or 

 the other, except through the spirit with which they are studied, and I 

 know by experience that the spirit with which the study of the Latin 

 and Greek grammars is often enforced is most demoralizing. Those 

 who have been born with a facility for language may laugh at this 

 statement ; but a boy who has been held up to ridicule for the want 

 of a good verbal memory, denied him by his Creator, long remem- 

 bers the depressing effect produced, if not the malignity aroused, 

 by the cruelty. Many are the men, now eminent in literature as well 

 as science, who have experienced the tyranny of a classical school, so 

 graphically described in the autobiography of Anthony TroUope ; and 

 many are the boys who might have been highly educated if their per- 

 ceptive faculties had been cultivated, whose career as scholars has 

 been cut short by the same tyranny. 



Again, a great deal has been said about specialization at an early 

 age, as if the study of Nature were specializing while the study of 

 Latin metres and Greek accents was liberalizing. But how could spe- 

 cialization be more strikingly illustrated than by a system which limits 

 a boy's attention between the ages of twelve and twenty to linguistic 

 studies to the almost entire exclusion of a knowledge of that universe 

 in which his life is to be passed, and which so limits his intellectual 

 training that his powers of observation are left undeveloped, his judg- 

 ments in respect to material relations unformed, and even his natural 

 conceptions of truth distorted ? Now, although a special culture which 

 has such mischievous results as these may be necessary in order to 

 command that power over language which marks the highest literary 

 excellence, and although a university should foster this culture by all 

 legitimate means, yet to enforce it upon every boy who aspires to be 



