120 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



The elder Silliman, elected professor of chemistry at Yale, in 

 1801, visited Professor Maclean, a yoiino- Scotch medical grad- 

 uate at Princeton, and there for the first time witnessed a chemical 

 experiment. Professor Cleveland, called to teach science at 

 Bowdoin, took a small box of mineralogical specimens to Philadel- 

 phia to find a man to name them. Elective studies were adopted 

 at Harvard in 1824, "against the judgment of the faculty." 

 "With the advent of Louis Agassiz, in 1848, Professor Picker- 

 ing's Physical Laboratory at Harvard, in 1867, the general 

 extension of laboratory' work in chemistry, and later in biology, 

 we have the laboratory method firmly fixed in science teaching, 

 and slowly making its way downward. 



The common school of the early part of the ceutur}-, I need not 

 describe. Some here probably knew it by personal experience. — 

 more by tradition. Its type still survives in the back districts, 

 though it would hardly be recognized in what we should now style 

 the model school. Yet it may be doubted whether in its best form 

 the transformation has been so complete as in the higher institu- 

 tions, and whether the common school of the present day furnishes 

 so complete a solution of the prol>lems present to the people of the 

 time as did the school of the earlier day. 



All the conditions which have been enumerated as compelling 

 revision of studies have l>een found prevailing with constantly increas- 

 ing force for the last half century. Population is rapidly passing 

 from countr}' to city ; the urban population of Massachusetts is 

 now seventy per cent of the total. John Ericson, who died so 

 recently in New York, was a working mechanical engineer in Eng- 

 land, at the birth of the railway system, and a competitor for 

 the prize offered for the first locomotive engine. Henry and 

 Morse made the telegraph possible and actual in the second 

 quarter of the century, and Edison is still in tlie prime of his 

 mal•^'ellous powers. 



The discoveries and inventions which have so increased the 

 power of production and communication, have correspondingly 

 increased the powers of intelligence. In the morning paper we 

 read the most recent histoi'y of remote countries ; combinations of 

 forces in all departments of human action are speedily made on the 

 most extended scale, and the range of the exertion of directive power 

 is only limited by the powers of the individual mind. There is great 

 significance in the statement of Francis Galton, that the average 



