440 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



LEARN AND SEARCH.* 



BY PBOF. RUD.OLPH VIRCHOW. 



OUR university has during its existence, now for more than 

 eighty-two years, celebrated the beginning of a new univer- 

 sity year in a peculiarly solemn manner. This October day is the 

 one among the festivals it observes which invites it to enter into 

 self -contemplation, to a review of its acquired results, to a testing 

 of the ways it has struck out, and again to the consideration of 

 new problems and to a look into the future. Have we solved 

 the problems that are set before us ? Have we made a faithful 

 use of the means for training youth for the highest objects of the 

 state and of manhood ? Can we surely expect that the hopes 

 which we and the Fatherland have built on our work will be 

 realized ? It is incumbent on the new rector to be the interpreter 

 of these problems. But whose mouth is eloquent enough to give 

 common expression to the often widely diversified thoughts of his 

 associates ? How few of us succeed in obtaining even only a gen- 

 eral view of the ever newly changing phases of single special 

 branches ! None of us, we often confess, is a bearer of all knowl- 

 edge. Each of us can do no more, with the best will, than judge 

 from the point of view of his own branch, of his own single experi- 

 ence out of the whole course of studies at the university. Hence 

 the temptation is pressing to make his own branch rather than 

 the generality of the studies the subject of his review. I shall en- 

 deavor to avoid this rock. 



The confidence of my associates has called me to this high 

 position forty-six years after I entered this faculty as a privat 

 docent, and after I have been active forty-three years as an ordi- 

 narius in a foreign university and here. Great changes have 

 taken place, not only in public affairs, but also in knowledge 

 greater than in hundreds of years before. All the single fields 

 of human activity have been transformed, many fundamentally, 

 or at least subjected to the incisive attacks of criticism. How 

 could one who has participated busily in public life have passed 

 through so great experiences without realizing it and with- 

 out disturbance ? Yet university life is not isolated amid tbe 

 general intellectual life of the people. We are obliged to look 

 around from our instruction upon instruction in general, the ele- 

 mentary and preparatory instruction which youth eager to learn 

 bring to us, as well as upon the instruction in the various higher 

 or technical schools, one after another of which has developed the 

 intelligible effort to be, or at least to be called, a high school. To 



* Rector's address at the Friedrich Wilhelm's University, Berlin, October 15, 1892. 



