January 12, 191 1] 



NATURE 



359 



which has had most influence on scientific teaching in 

 America ' was held in an old barn on an uninhabited 

 island, some eighteen miles from the shore. It lasted for 

 three months, and in effect it had but one teacher. The 

 school at Penikese existed in the personal presence of 

 Agassiz ; when he died, it vanished I 



Contact with great minds is not so common to-day as 

 it was when the men of the Old School were the leaders 

 of the new. The enthusiasm of struggle, the flash of 

 originality, grows more rare as our educational machinery 

 becomes more perfect. If our present system fails, it is 

 in the lack of personal contact and personal inspiration. 

 If we cannot create new Darwins, the raw material being 

 found, it is because they cannot walk with Henslow. 

 Henslow is somewhere else, perchance in some Govern- 

 ment bureau of science, or, it he is present, he has too 

 much on his mind to be a good walker. We do not value 

 him enough to make him free. 



We have too much university in America, and too much 

 of what we have in boys' schools. The university as such 

 is a minor affair, an exotic attachment. Should a great 

 teacher, a real man of God, of the God of things as they 

 are, arise in the faculty, he becomes a department 

 executive- More than half his students are of gymnasium 

 grade, and nine-tenths of his teaching is done by young 

 men, men who have not made their mark or who have 

 made it only as cogwheels in the machine. Too often 

 these are caught in the grind, and are never able to show 

 what they might have been if their struggles had been 

 towards higher ends. Smith teaching Zoology lo ; Brown, 

 Botany 7 ; and Robinson, Geolog}' 3, cannot lead their 

 students or themselves to look on nature in the large or 

 to see the wonderful vistas beheld by a Lyell or a Rum- 

 bokit. The university in America is smothered by the 

 arflege. The college has lost its refinement of purpose 

 through coalition with the university. The two are tele- 

 scoped together, to the disadvantage of both. The boy 

 has the freedom and the facility of the university when he 

 can make no use of it. The university man is entangled 

 in the meshes of the college. University facilities we have 

 enough for ten times — twenty times — the number of 

 students. We go into the market to hire young men to 

 avail themselves of them. There is no corresponding 

 emphasis laid upon men, and men of the first rank are no 

 more numerous to-day than they were in the days of 

 ' _ issiz, Lowell, Longfellow, Gray, Holmes, Dana, Silli- 

 , Gibbs, Leidy, Goodwin, Angell, White, and Goldwin 

 :th. 



: is the man who makes the school, and completes the 



ain of heredity from the masters of the last centurj- in 



1 Europe to the masters of the twentieth century in 



: -America. Excellent as our facilities are, complete as are 



j our libraries, our laboratories and our apparatus, easy as 



I is our access to all this, we have only made a beginning. 



\ Another ten years will see it all doubled. What we have 



is far from complete. But the pity of it is, our students 



I will not guess its incompleteness. Half as much or ten 



[ times as much, it is the same to them as the doubling of 



1 the bill of fare at the Waldorf-Astoria would be unnoticed 



the guests. A still greater pity is this, even the 



hers will not know the difference. They can use only 



..ar they have time and strength for. The output is no 



I greater for the helps we give. The greatest teacher is 



one who is ruler even over his books, and who is not 



'thered by them. 



-nthusiasm is cultivated by singleness of purpose, and 

 in our system we make provisions to distract rather than 

 to intensify. There is a learned society, to which manv 

 j of us belong, Sigma XI. Its value depends on its ability 

 ^ to make good its motto, Spoudon Xynones, " Comrades in 

 ^ Zeal." We whistle to keep up our courage in the multi- 

 tude, not of dangers, but of distractions, and if we whistle 

 m unison we may keep step together. This society in 

 : a cooperative way, the same spirit in different places, 

 stands for enthusiasm in science. Now enthusiasm comes 

 I from struggle, from the continuous effort to do what you 

 . want to do, and for the most part in the way you want 

 j to do it. Hence comraderv in zeal should make for 

 , individuality, for originalitj-. 



The most serious indictment of the "new school" in 

 "~"nce is its lack of originality. Even its novelties are 



NO. 2150, VOL. 85] 



not original. They are old fabrications worked over, with 

 a touch of oddity in the working. The requirements for 

 the doctor's degree tend to curb originality. But these do 

 not go far. A man may be original and even in a dress 

 coat in the daytime may be rated as summa cum lauda. 

 The greatest foe of originality is timeliness. Rather, 

 timeliness is evidence of lack of originality, of lack of 

 individual enthusiasm. 



When a discovery is made in botany the young botanists 

 are drawn to it as herrings to a searchlight, as moths to 

 a lantern. In Dr. Coulter's words, " they all dabble in 

 the same pool." Not long since the pool was located in 

 morphology ; then it was in embryology ; then in the fields 

 of mutative variations ; now it is filled with unit characters 

 and pedigreed cultures. 



I would not underrate any of these lines of work or 

 any other, but I respect a man the less when I see him 

 leaving his own field to plunge into one which is merely 

 timely, into one in which discovery seems to be easy, and 

 the outlook to a career to be facilitated. 



.All honour to the man who holds to his first love in 

 science, whatever that may be, and who records his gains 

 unflinchingly, though not another man on earth may notice 

 what he is doing. Sooner or later the world of science 

 returns to every piece of honest work. The revival of 

 the forgotten experiments of the priest Mendel will illus- 

 trate this in passing. Hundreds of men are Mendelians 

 now who would never have thought of planting a pea or 

 breeding a guinea-pig had not Mendel given the clue to 

 problems connected with these things. 



The man of to-day, busied with many cares, looms up 

 smaller than the man of the Old School who walked with 

 Henslow and then walked with nature. In this thought 

 it is easy to depreciate our educational present. 



Homer, referring to the Greeks of earlier times, assures 

 us " There are no such men in our degenerate days." I 

 have never verified this quotation — the men of our days 

 are too busy to verify anything — but we may take the 

 sentiment as characteristic. From the days of Homer 

 until our own time, the man of the Old School has always 

 found the times out of joint. Perhaps in getting so 

 elaborately ready we are preparing for a still more brilliant 

 future. It may be that books, apparatus, material, 

 administration, and training are all worth their weight in 

 men, and that modern educational opportunities are as 

 much better than old ones as on the surface they seem to 

 be. I know that all these misgivings of mine represent 

 no final failure. Each generation has such doubts, and 

 doubts which extend in every direction. The new strength 

 of the new generation solves its own problems. The new 

 men of the new schools of science will master the problems 

 of abundance and of distraction even as ours solved the 

 problem of hostility and of neglect. The man is suf)erior 

 to the environment, and the man of science will do the 

 work he loves for the love of it. In this love he will 

 develop the abundance of life in others as in himself, 

 and this is the highest end of all our striving. 



The atmosphere of a great teacher raises lesser men to 

 his standard. It perpetuates the breed. It was not books 

 or apparatus that made Dollinger or Agassiz or Bro<^s 

 successively centres, each of a school of research. It was 

 the contagion of devotion, the joy of getting at the heart 

 of things, the love of nature, the love of truth. Some- 

 times, in our wealth of educational opportunity, we long 

 for the time when, as of old, the student had the master 

 all to himself, the master unperplexed by duties of 

 administration, not called hither and thither by the duties 

 of his station, but giving himself, his enthusiasm, his 

 zeal, and his individuality to the student, not teaching 

 books, but how to make books our servants, all this time 

 master and student struggling together to make both ends 

 meet, and sometimes succeeding, " so happy and so poor." 

 So it was in the old time, and so it shall be again w^hen 

 the new demands and the new wealth find their adjust- 

 ment. And to find this we shall not go back to Grigsby's 

 Station, nor yet to Penikese; for the scholars that are to 

 be shall rebuild the .American universities in their own 

 way, as the scholars of to-day are restoring the University 

 of Cambridge, and in a greater or less degree all other 

 universities in all other lands where men know and love 

 the truth. 



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