THE MODERN UNIVERSITY. MOVEMENT 17 



inventors, to whom indeed all due honour be paid ; but we 

 are apt to forget that these men could never have been, had 

 there not preceded them some dreamer of dreams, some one 

 who cared for none of these things, some one who was more 

 of a poet than a practical man, a Faraday working in a cellar 

 with bits of wire and a compass needle, intent upon nothing 

 but deciphering some page in the great book of Nature. It is 

 only the ignorant, and among these many who pass for the 

 most learned, and are so in their narrow way it is only the 

 ignorant, who think that science is harsh, malodorous, mundane, 

 and unimaginative, and that we who follow it have strayed to 

 the worship of the golden calf. We cannot stock our 

 university with Faradays, nor should we wish to, but the 

 teaching of science there, be it but the science of making 

 soap if it is to be worth anything, even for a sordid end must 

 be imbued with a high intellectual spirit and informed by 

 a disinterested love of truth. 



And there is another thing to be remembered. Set your 

 mind, if you will, upon teaching a useful science ; you cannot 

 do it usefully without teaching the related realms of knowledge. 

 Begin with chemistry, and you must have physics ; you 

 cannot have physics, but you must have mathematics. Nor 

 must science be inarticulate, nor yet insular ; the cultivation 

 of languages must accompany it. And then your students 

 have to be taught before you get them, you have their teachers 

 to train in all the liberal studies, and so arise literature, history, 

 philosophy. Your hospitals beget a school of medicine and 

 your courts a school of law. You cannot avoid becoming 

 broad, if you but do what is plainly asked of you. 



I have no fear whatever of our becoming narrow in our 

 range of studies. In some thirty years we have passed from 

 the Yorkshire College of Science, with four professors, to the 

 University of Leeds, with thirty-two not because of any 

 sudden revolution, but from the natural growth of an institution 



