2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



knowledge. Regard the change with favor or disfavor, as you please, 

 the fact remains that the natural sciences have become the chief fac- 

 tors of our modern civilization ; and — which is the important point 

 in this connection — they have given rise to new professions which 

 more and more every year are opening occupations to our educated 

 men. The professions of the chemist, of the mining engineer, and of 

 the electrician, which have entirely grown up during the lifetime of 

 many here present, are just as "learned" as the older professions, and 

 are recognized as such by every university. Moreover, the old pro- 

 fession of medicine, which, when, as formerly, wholly ruled by author- 

 ity or traditions, might have been classed with the literary professions, 

 has come to rest on a purely scientific basis. 



In a word, the distinction between the literary and the scientific 

 professions has become definite and wide, and can no longer be ig- 

 nored in our systems of education. Now, while they would accord to 

 their classical associates the right to decide what is the best culture 

 for a literary calling, the scientific experts claim an equal right to 

 decide what is the best culture for a scientific calling. Ever since the 

 revival of Greek learning in Europe the literary scholars have been 

 working out an admirable system of education. In this system most 

 of us have been trained. I would pay it all honor, and I would here 

 bear my testimony to the acknowledged facts that in no departments 

 of our own university have the methods of teaching been so much im- 

 proved during the last few years as in the classical. I should resist 

 as firmly as my classical colleagues any attempt to emasculate the 

 well-tried methods of literary culture, and I have no sympathy what- 

 ever with the opinion that the study of the modern languages as polite 

 accomplishments can in any degree take the place of the critical study 

 of the great languages of antiquity. To compare German literature 

 with the Greek, or, what is worse, French literature with the Latin, as 

 means of culture, implies, as it seems to me, a forgetfulness of the true 

 spirit of literary culture. 



But literature and science are very different things, and " what is 

 one man's meat may be another man's poison," and the scientific 

 teachers claim the right to direct the training of their own men. It 

 is not their aim to educate men to clothe thought in beautiful and 

 suggestive language, to weave argument into correct and persuasive 

 forms, or to kindle enthusiasm by eloquence. But it is their object 

 to prepare men to unravel the mysteries of the universe, to probe the 

 secrets of disease, to direct the forces of nature, and to develop the 

 resources of this earth. These last aims may be less spiritual, lower 

 on your arbitrary intellectual scale, if you please, than the first ; but 

 they are none the less legitimate aims which society demands of edu- 

 cated men : and all we claim is that the astronomers, the physicists, 

 the chemists, the biologists, the physicians, and the engineers, who 

 have shown that they are able to answer these demands of society, 



