252 



NATURE 



[July i6, 1903 



the smallest experience, perhaps with the smallest memory 

 of what he was and what his school fellows were at the 

 age of seventeen or eighteen, can make, to know that the 

 master of the dead lahguages of a kind which enables 

 them to enjoy those great works with their foot on the 

 hearth, which is the only way to enjoy any work of litera- 

 ture, the number of boys who leave the great public and 

 secondary schools with that amount of knowledge is a very, 

 very small percentage. You cannot keep up a system of 

 education for a very, very small percentage ; and, if that 

 is the only defence of classical education, I think it will 

 have to be abandoned except for the few who are qualified 

 to derive all the immense advantages which to the few 

 they are capable of imparting. But when I turn to the 

 other side and ask what the substitute is, then I confess 

 I am even less happy than when I consider the classical 

 ideal ; for I am quite sure — no, I am not quite sure, but I 

 think — you will never find science a good medium for con- 

 veying education to classes of forty or fifty boys who do 

 not care a farthing about the world they live in except 

 in so far as it concerns the cricket field, or the football 

 field, or the river — you will never make science a good 

 medium of education for those boys ; for only a few are 

 capable at that age, and perhaps at any age, of learning 

 all the lessons which science is capable of teaching. I go 

 further. I never have been able to see, so far as I am 

 concerned, how you are going to get that supply of science 

 teachers for secondary schools who have both the time to 

 keep themselves abreast of the ever-changing aspects of 

 modern science and to do all the important work which 

 the English schoolmaster has to do, which is that not 

 simply of teaching classes, but of influencing a house and 

 impressing moral and intellectual characteristics on those 

 committed to his charge. 



I do not know whether it was Lord Kelvin's presence 

 which inspired me to say something which I was afraid 

 he would not like. I did not mean to deal with this topic 

 at any length. I only meant to say that while, as far 

 as I am concerned, I think we have not yet arrived at the 

 ideal system or the ideal character of our secondary and 

 public school education, I do think that, so far as this 

 assembly is concerned and the universities are concerned, 

 we are on much more solid ground when we come to the 

 education with which they have got to deal ; and especially 

 and chiefly do I say that we are on absolutely secure ground 

 when we are dealing with that post-graduate education 

 which, I hope, will be the great practical result, or one 

 of the great practical results, of the meeting which I am 

 addressing to-night. We know exactly what we want when 

 dealing with post-graduate education, and it is our busi- 

 ness to see that the students who desire it have it, and 

 that the opportunity of those who do desire it is augmented 

 so far as our influence will go. I daresay that many of 

 us have looked back with a certain regret, and a certain 

 feeling of shame, to the medieval passion for learning 

 without fee and without reward — with no desire to make 

 the universities stepping-stones to good places or to 

 successful mercantile or industrial undertakings — but with 

 an ideal which made thousands of students from every 

 country in Europe undergo hardships which would be re- 

 garded in these softer days as absolutely intolerable, for 

 the sole purpose of seeking, and it might be finding, the 

 great secret of knowledge. We despise, and we perhaps 

 rightly despise, their methods. We know that they were 

 not in touch with the actual realities of the world in which 

 they lived. Yet, after all, we have something to learn 

 from them ; and if we in these days could imitate their 

 disinterested passion for knowing and for extending the 

 bounds of knowledge, surely we, with our better methods, 

 and our clearer appreciation of what we can know and 

 what we cannot know, might accomplish things as yet 

 undreamed of. Now, what did they do? They moved 

 from university to university, from Oxford to Paris, from 

 Paris to Padua, from country to country, in order that they 

 might sit at the feet of some great master of learning, 

 some great teacher Who might lead their thoughts into 

 undreamed of paths. I hope that in the universities of the 

 future every great teacher will attract to himself from 

 other universities students who may catch his spirit — young 

 men who may be guided by him in the paths of scientific 

 fame ; men who may come to him from north or from south ; 

 and who, whether they come from the narrow bounds of 



NO. 1759, VOL. 68] 



this island or from the furthest verge of the Empire, may 

 feel that they have always open to them the best that 

 the Empire can afford, and that within the Empire they 

 can find some man of original genius and great teaching 

 gifts who may spread the light of knowledge and further 

 the cause of research. 



I have said that they were to find this — I have suggested, 

 at all events, that they should find this— within the limits 

 of the Empire. I hope that in putting it that way I have 

 not spoken any treason against the universality of learning 

 or the cosmopolitan character of science. 1 quite agree 

 that the discoveries made in one university or by one in- 

 vestigator are at once the common property of the world ; 

 and we all rejoice that it is so. No jealous tariff's stand 

 between the free communication of ideas. And surely we 

 may be happy that that is the fact. And yet, though know- 

 ledge is cosmopolitan, though science knows no country 

 and is moved by no passion — not even the noblest passion 

 of patriotism — still I do think that in the methods and 

 machinery of imparting knowledge, as there always has 

 been in modern times, so there may still continue to be 

 some national differentiation in the character of our uni- 

 versities, something in our great centres of knowledge 

 which reflects the national character and suits the individual 

 feeling, and that an English-speaking student and a citizen 

 of the Empire, from whatever part of the world he may 

 hail, ought to find something equally suited to him as a 

 student, and more congenial to him as a man, in some 

 university within the ample bounds of the Empire. If that 

 be our ideal, we have to ask ourselves whether we have 

 accomplished it, or whether we are in process of accomplish- 

 ing it. I am afraid it is too clear that we have not accom- 

 plished it. But that we are in process of- accomplishing it, 

 and that we can accomplish it — of that I do not entertain 

 the smallest doubt. The movement which has begun with 

 the inter-university meeting, of which this is the culmin- 

 ation, that movement is not destined to finish with this 

 evening's proceedings. It is but the beginning and the 

 seed of far greater things. And I feel confident that, if 

 the, representative men whom I see here gathered together 

 from all parts of the world should by good fortune meet 

 a few years hence in this metropolis of the Empire, they 

 will be able to say, and to say with confidence, that the 

 work begun to-night has not been unfruitful ; that the 

 machinery for interchanging ideas between our great 

 academic centres has worked admirable good, not merely 

 for the individual student, and not merely for the cause of 

 knowledge, but for the cause of Empire itself. And while 

 learning ought never to be perverted to the cause of faction, 

 or to the cause of separation between the different sections 

 of mankind, yet nevertheless it will be true that this inter- 

 communication of the highest thoughts between the leaders 

 of academic training in every portion of the Empire tQ 

 which we belong will have furthered not merely sound 

 learning, but sound patriotism. It is in that faith that 

 I have been proud to share, however humbly, the work on 

 which yo'i are engaged. It is this, I think, that will make 

 memorable in academic history the undertaking which my 

 friend. Sir Gilbert Parker, more, perhaps, than any rnan in 

 this room, has set himself to accomplish ; and it is in the 

 cause of education, of learning, of research, of science, and 

 of Empire that I now ask you to fill your glasses and drink 

 to the toast of the universities of the King's over-sea 

 dominions. 



NOTES. 

 It is proposed to change the name of the Jenner Institute 

 of Preventive Medicine to the Lister Institute of Preventive 

 Medicine. A memorandum which has been sent by the 

 governing body to the members of the institute states as 

 one reason for the change of name that there is in London 

 a commercial firm trading under the name of " The Jenner 

 Institute for Calf Lymph," with a prior legal claim to 

 the name of Jenner Institute. So great has the incon- 

 venience become on account of the confusion between the 

 two institutes, that the governing body has determined 

 to seek the sanction of their members and of the Board of 

 Trade to change the name of the institute to the Lister 



