NATURAL SCIENCE TO GENERAL SCIENCE. 17 



of expression, and are thus made less and less definite, as is 

 obvious from the comparison of any modern European language 

 with Latin ; in English the process has gone further than in 

 any other. This seems to me to be really the reason why the 

 modern languages are far less fitted than the ancient for instru- 

 ments of education. 1 



As grammar is the staple of school education, legal studies 

 are used, and rightly, as a means of training persons of maturer 

 age, even when not specially required for professional purposes. 



We now come to those sciences which, in respect of the kind 

 of intellectual labour they require, stand at the opposite end 

 of the series to philology and history ; namely, the natural and 

 physical sciences. I do not mean to say that in many branches 

 even of these sciences an instinctive appreciation of analogies 

 and a certain artistic sense have no part to play. On the 

 contrary, in natural history the decision which characteristics 

 are to be looked upon as important for classification, and which 

 as unimportant, what divisions of the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms are more natural than others, is really left to an 

 instinct of this kind, acting without any strictly definable rule. 

 And it is a very suggestive fact that it was an artist, Goethe, 

 who gave the first impulse to the researches of comparative 

 anatomy into the analogy of corresponding organs in different 

 animals, and to the parallel theory of the metamorphosis of 

 leaves in the vegetable kingdom; and thus, in fact, really 

 pointed out the direction which the science has followed ever 

 since. But even in those departments of science where we 

 have to do with the least understood vital processes, it is, 

 speaking generally, far easier to make out general and compre- 

 hensive ideas and principles, and to express them in definite 

 language, than in cases where we must base our judgment on 

 the analysis of the human mind. It is only when we come to 

 the experimental sciences to which mathematics are applied, 

 and especially when we come to pure mathematics, that we 



' Those to whom German is not a foreign tongue may, perhaps, be per- 

 mitted to hold different views on the efficacy of modern languages in educa- 

 tion. TR. 



